That day, Wade said a lot, and the Dungeon Lords said a lot back. Some proposals sounded absolutely brilliant the moment they were floated — right up until the group actually got into the weeds of implementation, when the problems started surfacing.
Nearly the entire day went into hashing out the feasibility of various ideas. Wade genuinely got a look at what could only be called the "varied ways of life" among his peers.
Some Dungeon Lords worried the proposed activities skewed too difficult for adventurers and pushed for lower difficulty across the board. Others shouted the opposite — not nearly hard enough, in their view, far too merciful toward the poor adventurers.
Predictably, the two camps started arguing.
By the end, they'd actually arranged a Dungeon Battle to settle it, tabling the argument until then.
Turned out these Dungeon Lords carried a surprising amount of fighting spirit.
Each Lord's style tracked closely with the region their dungeon occupied. The one shouting for higher difficulty came from a dungeon rooted in a warrior nation with a blunt, hardy local culture. The one demanding lower difficulty presided over a peaceful, prosperous region.
Most of the discussion, though, stayed fairly harmonious.
"The Meteor Fairies don't come with alternate-color variants naturally. Are we supposed to paint them? They move too fast — the paint would rub off almost immediately. Maybe we swap in a different monster entirely."
"What exactly does an achievement title mean? Ah — a reward for adventurers who make an especially notable contribution. But why does it need to hover as glowing text above their heads? Well — actually, that's kind of appealing. I happen to hold an authority that does exactly this. Genuinely never thought I'd find a use for it in my lifetime. Please, let me be the one handling title distribution."
"How do we rank adventurers, exactly? Total Meteors captured? And we'd need a shared ranking across all forty-plus dungeons at once. If that's the plan, my authority would come in handy here."
As the Dungeon Lords kept piling in, all manner of strange authorities began surfacing. Abilities that had once seemed genuinely useless suddenly found real purpose, supplying the technical backbone needed to make Wade's various "wild ideas" work in practice.
There really were talented people scattered among the Dungeon Lords. And every one of them, genuinely pleasant to talk to.
Wade loved this place.
Beyond the legitimate planning, a fair number of decidedly less proper suggestions came up too.
"Should we throw in some aphrodisiac Slime meteors? I can supply those."
"Heh — then my tentacle-monster pitfall traps absolutely need to be part of this. Slimes and tentacle monsters, a match made in heaven."
"Hey now, mind your manners. We're all ancient fossils here, and you're still this perverted? Fine, count my Goblin Tribe in too."
"Are you people ACTUALLY planning an event right now?!" Rainbow Horn burst out.
"Yo, throw my Hypno in the mix while you're at it."
"Aldwin — how did even you get corrupted?!"
For a gathering that could easily have played out as a somber meeting of thousand-year-old fossils, the room instead crackled with wild imagination and a genuinely friendly atmosphere.
Felt more like a fan convention than anything else.
After hashing it back and forth, several core activities finally got locked in.
First: the fantasy-world Quidditch premise would stay, but the actual object being captured would shift from Meteor Fairies to the Minior that Sein Dungeon supplied. Not just because the slower Minior suited the average adventurer's speed better than the frantically fast Meteor Fairies — but because Minior naturally spawned across a spectrum of colors, only visible once their outer shells cracked open. That added genuine randomness and discovery to the capture loop.
Second: Encounter Battles, added on top. The more Minior an adventurer captured, the greater their chance of triggering an Elite Monster encounter upon returning to the exchange point. Specific monster types left entirely up to each individual dungeon.
Third: a shared adventurer ranking system.
Fourth: achievement titles.
Fifth: a World Boss.
Sixth: Red Fang Dungeon would reward each Dungeon Lord proportionally, based on how well their own adventurers ranked.
Seventh...
When Red Fang laid out the seventh rule, Gong Qiying couldn't help asking:
"Won't this fracture the worldview each dungeon's built up?"
The seventh rule: every participating dungeon could freely offer its own dungeon-specific rewards, and adventurers could exchange those rewards at any participating dungeon, regardless of where they'd earned them.
Cross-dungeon resource exchange.
And this idea had come, genuinely, from Red Fang — a native-born Dungeon Lord of this actual world.
Wade had considered the possibility himself, but had held back from proposing it, wary it might reshape how the outside world understood dungeons as a whole system. He genuinely hadn't known whether that would land as good or bad.
Red Fang, though, turned out to be strikingly open-minded about it.
"Since it's rare enough for all of us to gather like this and actually put on something fun — and the gods even sent us a genius like you — we might as well go all in. We're Dungeon Lords. Demon Kings and heroes fade into history eventually. Dungeons never do. This entire world depends on us for its survival. If we can't muster confidence in our own work, who in this world possibly could? As for how outsiders end up interpreting our mutations, or what they make of it afterward — none of that matters..."
Red Fang blinked. A flicker of arrogance, genuinely cunning, crossed his eyes.
"They're welcome to stop coming to dungeons altogether, if they've got the nerve."
The Red Dragon's wings snapped wide open. A fierce gust rolled through the room, laced with scorching heat — the full confidence and pride of a genuinely veteran Dungeon Lord on display.
Dungeons had, by now, woven themselves deeply into everyday life across this world. Stepping into one was as unremarkable as eating a meal. The combined territory of the forty-plus Dungeon Lords in this room blanketed the entire continent.
Was that many dungeons going to see adventurers vanish overnight over one brief mutation?
How could that possibly happen?
Well over half the world's population relied on dungeons for their livelihood. And for dungeons genuinely offering worthwhile experiences, adventurer loyalty ran astonishingly deep. On top of that, scholarly circles reliably produced perfectly reasonable explanations for any dungeon change, almost automatically.
Wade found himself smiling in genuine relief.
He suddenly felt like the careful, conservative way he'd always tried to preserve the dungeon world's internal consistency had been, in retrospect, a little too timid.
Looking around now, every Dungeon Lord in the room was cracking their knuckles, visibly itching to show off exactly what they could do.
Felt like spring returning — everything bursting back to life at once.
These old fossils had found themselves a genuine second youth.
Everyone had grasped, all at once, what the seventh rule actually meant.
Using each dungeon's unique rewards to poach adventurer traffic away from everyone else's.
This wasn't remotely a favor for adventurers.
It was a competitive edge — specifically, for whichever dungeons actually had the means to compete.
An unprecedented promotional war, essentially.
The Dungeon Lords were about to transform into the single most conniving cast of NTR villains imaginable, stealing customer traffic straight out from under one another.
Wade hadn't felt this genuinely fired up in a long time.
He glanced down at his own withered palm.
Clenched, entirely without his permission.
"I am absolutely going to bombard these adventurers with so many good rewards they won't know which way is up!"
A little cursing wasn't bad manners.
It was simply the native tongue of a man riding real enthusiasm.
Wade scratched his head, half-convinced he could feel yellow hair sprouting from his entirely bald undead skull — everyone around him looking, somehow, faintly green with matching anticipation.
Red Fang looked thoroughly satisfied with the reaction. This, in his estimation, was exactly the spirit a new generation of Dungeon Lords ought to carry.
He let out a mighty roar.
"Alright! Everyone — get back and start your preparations. Once you're ready, send word. Before tomorrow evening's meteor shower crosses the sky, let OUR meteors shine brighter still!"
Afterward, Wade traded contact details with several Dungeon Lords who'd lingered behind, hoping to pick his brain on design methodology. Then he returned to Sein and dropped straight into a genuinely brutal work schedule.
Activities One through Seven each drew on the authority of their respective sponsoring Dungeon Lords — nothing Wade needed to personally oversee.
His own responsibility: Activity Five. The World Boss.
Every Dungeon Lord had submitted candidates from among their own most powerful monsters, and a formal vote decided which would actually serve in the role. Since Red Fang Dungeon was covering the mana cost of summoning them, Wade put forward a handful of his own frighteningly expensive monsters, all bearing some loose thematic connection to meteors.
[Nargacuga]
[Astel]
[Valstrax]
Nargacuga: ??? Am I even supposed to be here right now?
Worth clarifying — none of these were their strongest possible forms. Ordinary variants, some carrying genuine physical defects. Sein Dungeon's summonable roster split across different periods of a monster's existence, much like how Wade could currently summon the Abyss-corrupted, crippled "Abyss Walker" Artorias, but not the version at the height of his strength as the "Wolf Knight."
The Astel on offer here was the most baseline version available — nowhere near "Astel, Naturalborn of the Void," the entity that destroyed the Eternal City in Elden Ring's own lore, let alone the considerably stronger "Astel, Stars of Darkness."
Same story for the Crimson Glow Valstrax.
Not the mysterious crimson-glowing variant whose combat power, relative to the original, remained genuinely impossible to pin down.
The version Wade could actually summon carried real flaws — smaller frame, a notable tendency toward self-detonation.
Worth mentioning: the moment Red Fang laid eyes on Valstrax, his own eyes practically bulged out of his skull. He immediately shoved the female dragon beside him aside without ceremony.
After several rounds of voting, the World Boss title ultimately landed on —
Astel!
A genuinely unexpected outcome. Wade had assumed the room would gravitate toward the sleek, cool-looking Valstrax.
But it turned out that, weighed against raw coolness, the Dungeon Lords carried a stronger collective preference for Astel's genuinely bizarre aesthetic.
Curious as they clearly were, none of them ever asked Wade where these creatures had actually come from.
They simply regarded him with even deeper respect.
"Alright. Today's real work: Astel, plus all the miscellaneous design details."
Time passed.
After an exhausting night spent working like some sleep-abandoning immortal cultivator, Wade and the other Dungeon Lords finally completed everything.
And so, just as night approached today — before the actual meteor shower had even reached this land — every participating dungeon quietly began the prelude to its mutation.
Red Fang Dungeon.
Adventurers who'd come dreaming of slaying dragons and bathing in dragon blood looked up and cried out in astonishment.
"Meteors!"
The same scene was unfolding across countless dungeons simultaneously. The internal meteor shower stole the spotlight entirely from the real one outside — every witnessing adventurer left standing with their mouth hanging open.
Unicorn Dungeon.
A sweet couple watched a small Minior settle beside them, letting out delighted squeals at something this genuinely adorable.
Sticky Dungeon.
An adventurer's head got enveloped by a descending Aphrodisiac Slime Meteor. His eyes flared red instantly — and he lunged straight for his teammate.
Boulder Dungeon.
A middle-aged man bearing a seven- or eight-tenths resemblance to Leon took a direct hit from a genuinely high-speed meteorite.
He returned, gloriously, straight to the Revival House.
"Oh no, oh no! How did I accidentally configure real meteorites into the meteor shower?!"
The Boulder Dungeon Lord clawed frantically at his own hair.
Sein Dungeon.
Having sworn himself to the Blades of the Darkmoon, Fingri transformed into an invader and materialized inside Irithyll.
He arrived just in time to watch a Fallingstar Beast plummet from the sky, briefly take the shape of a cute little star, and smash into the ground — wiping out the Light Eagle Corps' entire contingent of miscellaneous soldiers in one motion.
Then it seized Eliphis in its jaws and bolted, thoroughly delighted with itself.
A knot of captains chased after them, shouting.
Not one of them so much as glanced at Fingri.
"Did I show up at a bad time?"
He stood there, genuinely at a loss.
A Minior drifted past in front of him, staring back with open curiosity.
"Such a cute little guy. How'd you end up somewhere this dangerous?"
He reached out and touched it — the texture identical to handling a plain stone. He picked it up gently and lobbed it, with careful restraint, toward somewhere considerably safer.
"Don't wander back over here, okay? It's dangerous."
With that, he drew his sword and fell in with the group still chasing after the Light Eagle Corps.
Fingri had absolutely no idea that the Minior he'd just tossed aside was about to become the single most frantically hunted treasure among adventurers for days to come.