I am the Demon King of the Dungeon!

As the white light dissipated in the throne room, Dracula was standing beside the long table, holding two cups of freshly brewed black tea.

His questioning gaze fell on Arthas, where Perion was curled up in a ball, his crimson armor still smeared with fragments of black crystals.

"Your Majesty, the Demon Lord," Dracula pushed one of the cups of black tea onto the long table near the throne, "Pirien's condition seems..."

"She's just asleep."

"I can see that," Dracula adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses. "What I mean is that the most reasonable course of action right now is to revive Perion; its condition will recover much faster. Otherwise, on the twentieth floor..."

"No need." Arthas placed Pilian on the soft couch next to the throne and casually pulled a blanket over her.

Pirian rolled over, rolled the blanket into a ball and hugged it to his chest, the bells on his feet jingling twice.

"Let her sleep."

Dracula made a note on the document: "As you command, I will ask the Skeleton Whisperer to prepare for the enemy."

"it is good."

Arthas sat on the throne, tapping his fingers on the armrest. The throne room fell silent for a few moments, broken only by Pirion's even breathing and the rustling of Dracula flipping through documents.

"Dracula".

"exist."

"What's the situation on the fifteenth floor now?"

Dracula paused in his flipping through the documents. He looked up, a hint of surprise flashing in his eyes behind his gold-rimmed glasses. After all, the Demon King rarely took the initiative to concern himself with matters below the middle management level.

"The fifteenth floor, the Undead Prison. The boss is a Death Knight, level 210, a high-ranking monster." Dracula turned to the corresponding page. "Currently, the completion rate is only 13%, and the fear value income ranks tenth among the twenty-five floors, making it... a mediocre floor."

"Neither good nor bad."

Arthas repeated those four words.

Dracula astutely sensed the Demon King's dissatisfaction. He closed the file, clasped his hands in front of him, and adopted a standard reporting posture: "Your Excellency, what do you mean?"

"How long did it take the Oracle Squad to clear the fifteenth floor?"

Dracula reopened the file and found the Oracle Squad's strategy record: "Total time: four hours and twenty-two minutes, of which the BOSS battle took thirty-seven minutes."

"Thirty-seven minutes." Arthas's fingers tapped rhythmically on the armrest of his throne. "They only took thirty-seven minutes. Where do you think the problem lies?"

Dracula remained silent for a moment.

"The Death Knight's skill set is too simplistic: Shadow Slash, Death Coil, Summon Skeleton Warriors, plus Unyielding Will which triggers when health drops below 30%. These four skills can be used in a cycle. Once adventurers figure out the rhythm, the rest is just a matter of time."

"Anything else?"

"Information," Dracula continued, "The adventurers have already thoroughly explored the first fifteen levels. In addition, the terrain of the fifteenth level is too simple, lacking traps. Adventurers can maintain their formation from beginning to end, and the Death Knight's charge skill is limited by the terrain, making prediction extremely difficult."

Arthas nodded.

This is where the problem lies.

The fifteenth floor is the watershed between the middle and upper levels, and theoretically it should be a hard threshold. However, the combination of a straight corridor and a cycle of skills turns the Death Knight, which should be a threshold, into a wooden stake. Adventurers only need to figure out the cycle, dodge the skills, and output stable damage to pass through.

No wonder the fear value ranking is fourteenth.

Neither good nor bad, just mediocre.

Mediocre dungeons cannot filter out adventurers.

"I want to change the fifteenth floor."

Dracula's quill was already in his hand.

"Please speak."

Arthas did not speak immediately.

He leaned back on the throne, his gaze passing over Dracula's shoulder and landing on the Gothic reliefs on the throne room's dome. The candlelight flickered in the grooves of the reliefs, casting the menacing dragon shadows onto the walls, sometimes bright, sometimes dim.

His mind was replaying distant memories.

A rented room late at night.

The computer screen emitted a stark white light, and my hands, gripping the controller, were sweating. On the screen was a stranger in tattered armor walking through a misty graveyard.

The tombstone was crooked, the withered tree looked like claws, and a bell was ringing in the distance. The stranger walked slowly, taking each step with caution, holding his shield to his chest and pointing his sword forward.

Around the corner, a skeleton leaped out from behind a tombstone. The stranger raised his shield to block and counterattacked, the skeleton crumbling. Continuing forward, another skeleton appeared, this time falling from the ceiling. The stranger was hit, his health bar plummeting, and he tumbled away in a sorry state.

Drink the medicine, raise the shield, and fight back.

Go forward again.

The stranger stepped on a loose stone slab, and poisoned arrows shot out from holes in the wall on both sides. He dodged the first one, but was hit in the shoulder by the second. His health bar began to turn green and slowly and steadily dropped. He frantically rummaged through his backpack for an antidote, but still couldn't find one...

You died.

The screen was filled with blood-red text.

Arthas remembered his expression at that moment. Not anger, not frustration, but a strange excitement, because he knew where he had died, how he had died, and how to avoid it next time. So he clicked "Resurrect" and started over from the save point. He traversed the misty graveyard, dodged the skeletons around the corner, avoided attacks from the ceiling, and avoided loose stone slabs, but was then struck on the head by a minotaur hiding around the corner.

You died.

I died again, revived again, and ran through the whole process again.

That night, he died twenty-seven times in the same scene. By the time he finished the game, the sky outside the window was already turning light. He put down the controller, his fingers were trembling, and his back was covered in sweat, but he remembered every trap in the game.

Arthas's lips curled up slightly.

Dracula caught the expression and unconsciously tightened his grip on the quill, because whenever the Demon King showed such a smile, it meant that something was going to suffer, usually an adventurer, sometimes a monster, and worse, both at the same time.

"Dracula".

"exist."

"Tear down the entire fifteenth floor."

"all?"

"all."

"From the terrain, the monster configuration, the boss mechanics, everything, we'll start from scratch." Arthas sat up straight, a light that Dracula had never seen before shining in his amber vertical pupils. "Keep the theme of the necropolis, but no corridors. I want a real prison. A multi-level structure, preferably with vertical connections, cells, interrogation rooms, the warden's office, and the underground morgue—build it all."

Dracula's quill moved swiftly across the paper.

"The terrain needs to be complex enough, with elevation changes, corners, hidden doors, and dead ends. It should force adventurers to explore, rather than simply following a straight path."

"clear."

"Save point".

Upon hearing this, Dracula stopped writing.

"...Save point?"

Arthas realized he had used a term from Earth, so he paused and switched to a term that the continent of Ashu could understand: "A variant of the safe zone, with a magic circle set up at the entrance to the fifteenth floor. If an adventurer touches it and dies on the fifteenth floor, they can be resurrected directly at the magic circle."

"This..." Dracula's pen hovered over the paper, not falling. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses, his pupils contracted slightly, and the silence lasted for three full breaths.

"Your Excellency Demon Lord," Dracula's voice was cautious, "you mean... to make adventurers repeatedly resurrect on the fifteenth floor?"

"right."