Creature Card
The reason Flower-Fruit Mountain was Flower-Fruit Mountain wasn't just that it had a stone stele bearing the words "Flower-Fruit Mountain."
The real Flower-Fruit Mountain had cascading waterfalls and springs, exotic flowers and rare plants, peach groves and fruit trees, and apes and monkeys frolicking.
But right now, not one of those things was there.
His Flower-Fruit Mountain was nothing but a bare mountain of rock, without so much as a blade of grass.
The Stone Left Over from Mending Heaven wasn't the Stone Left Over from Mending Heaven just because that was its name, either.
It needed the accumulation of years, nourishment from heaven and earth, and an infusion of the essence of the sun and moon.
It also needed the "logic" of the entire Journey to the West world to support its existence... from Flower-Fruit Mountain to Water Curtain Cave, from the Eastern Victory Divine Continent to the Western Ox Continent, from the structure of the Three Realms to the Heavenly Court and the Underworld.
Only once all of that was complete could the stone truly "come to life" and become that monkey.
"Reaching heaven in a single step really isn't possible," Su Mu said with a sigh, though a smile played at the corners of his mouth.
It hadn't worked, but he had already confirmed the most crucial thing.
This path was one he could follow.
From F to D, all it had taken was naming two things.
Next, he had to keep refining it.
He would add vegetation, water sources, and animals to Flower-Fruit Mountain, making it truly "Flower-Fruit Mountain"; give the Stone Left Over from Mending Heaven a mechanism to infuse it with the essence of the sun and moon; and even build the framework for the entire Eastern Victory Divine Continent.
Every step would bring a new boost.
Once the world of Journey to the West truly unfolded...
Su Mu almost didn't dare imagine it.
He calmed himself and checked his soul power.
He had 160 points left.
That looked like a lot, but it was nowhere near enough.
Opening up the space, shaping the terrain, and naming things had already used up more than fifty points of his soul power.
And everything he needed to build next would cost more than the last. Water had to be channeled into Water Curtain Cave, and it needed a waterfall; the peach grove needed trees that bore fruit; and that was to say nothing of adding living creatures later on.
At that thought, Su Mu's eyes flickered.
Living creatures.
That was the biggest bottleneck right now.
In this world, dungeon construction fell into two broad categories: inanimate objects and living things.
Inanimate objects... terrain, buildings, items, mechanisms... could be formed directly by spending soul power.
But living things... animals, plants, monsters, humans... were another matter entirely.
There were only two ways to create living things.
First, buy creature cards and import them into the dungeon.
Second, establish a complete biological cycle within the dungeon and let living things arise naturally.
The first path required money.
Lots of money.
Even a creature card of the lowest grade, F-rank, had a market price starting in the thousands of Alliance coins.
Better-quality ones could cost hundreds of thousands or even millions. As for him, never mind hundreds of thousands—he could barely afford even a basic materials pack.
More importantly, it also required a great deal of soul power, because the creature cards introduced wouldn't necessarily fit the theme and would need constant "adjustment."
The second path required time and a complete ecological logic. He hadn't even grown any grass yet, so how could he talk about a biological cycle?
So the two things he lacked right now were soul power and money.
Gaining soul power required levels, and gaining levels required killing monsters. As for money, the fastest way to earn it was also killing monsters.
So it all came down to one thing: using his dungeon to fight monsters.
The only problem was that, at present, his dungeon had no combat ability whatsoever.
Su Mu glanced at the Heaven-Mending Stone on Flower-Fruit Mountain.
For now, all he could do was wait on that front.
And to gain combat power, the first thing he absolutely needed was...
"Creature cards..." Su Mu murmured.
"Looks like I need to go to the school and claim the reward from before."
At the end of last semester, he had represented Rongcheng No. 1 High School in the citywide dungeon design simulation competition.
He had taken first place and won the championship. At the time, the school leadership had announced in front of all the teachers and students that the reward was a creature card below E-rank.
They hadn't handed it out on the spot because creature cards had to match the dungeon's theme.
For example, if your dungeon had an ice attribute and you were given a fire-attribute creature card, it would be no different from a scrap of paper. So the standard practice for this kind of reward was to wait until after the awakening ceremony, then pick one from the school storeroom based on the theme.
"I hope there won't be some melodramatic plot where they go back on their word! That would be way too cliché."
Su Mu shook his head.
He had read plenty of novels like that in his previous life, so he was a little jumpy.
Smiling, Su Mu put the thought aside and rose from his seat.
The classroom was a little too quiet at the moment.
Everyone's eyes were shut tight, their brows alternately furrowing and relaxing as fluctuations of soul power flickered through the air like ripples.
Fine beads of sweat had already appeared on some people's foreheads, though they wore barely concealed smiles; others were pale, their lips pressed tight, clearly having run into trouble during construction.
No one noticed Su Mu leave.