World Bounty Aftermath – Upgrading Your Base

The next few days are something of a blur. You order your minions to finally start work on the mage tower, partly because you want to finally see its effects but partly because you feel you've earned a well-deserved break. Several days largely spent sleeping, lounging around, and playing with your newfound toy later, you finally get the notification that it's done.

The completed tower is... honestly, it's less different than you expected. While the old ruin raised about two and a half stories before ending in rubble, the new one climbs four stories and is tipped by a tall, pointed blue cone. Its inside is largely unfurnished, with a spiral staircase running up one side and repaired versions of the old mouldering furniture that you remember with a hint of nostalgia.

Unique Structure: Wizard's Tower (Level 1)
Level 1: Allows basic specialized rooms to be added to the tower. Slowly gathers and stores mana.
Upgrade to Level 2: 500 stone, 300 wood, 100 ore, 1 mana crystal (small), Miniboss status
Yes/No

Given it seems like one of the tower's main purposes is mana generation you should probably expect to need to find a new crystal at every stage. You grimace, now having a clearer understanding of what that entails: hopefully you don't need to spend another day letting high-level adventurers use you as a loot piñata every time you want to upgrade your base.

You scroll through the rooms available as additions to the wizard's tower and settle on three promising candidates: an arcane library, an alchemy lab, and an enchanter's workshop. The latter two will be especially useful now that you have a new minion who will need decent gear, and the library—on top of just plain fitting the setting—apparently allows you to research better recipes for the other rooms. You place them on the second, third, and fourth floors respectively, leaving the ground floor open as it's still a major point of transit in and out of your dungeon.

Next, you check your summoning circle. Apparently you've received tribute from an enemy—you smirk at the recollection—but not converted an enemy to your cause, not that you need to fulfill both conditions. You realize that Arialle still is technically an enemy, although not an especially hostile one, and puzzle over how exactly to fix that when upgrading the Summoning Circle gives you the obvious answer.

Unique Structure: Summoning Circle (Level 3)
Level 3: Can summon moderate daemons.
Upgrade to Level 4: Make a contract with a willing adventurer.
Yes/No

You're somewhat disappointed in the continued dearth of non-daemonic summoning, but perhaps you can change that soon. You doubt you'll have any trouble convincing the ex-priestess to sign a contract: after all, she originally came to you in pursuit of one, and with her newfound subservience you had no real reason not to give her favourable terms. That can wait for a bit, though: you still have plenty of resources to spend.

Fame: 1727
Recent Activity

• World Bounty: +1020
• Defeated a hero (x32): +160
• Defeated a higher-level hero (x3): +8
• Adventurer-created quest expired: +5
• Quest abandoned: +1
• People are talking about you: +452

Wow, is that ever a lot of talk! You wince as you realize that most of it is no doubt due to the adventurers now bearing your likeness at your expense. But hey, you can't change the past: might as well at least accept some fame as compensation for your stint as a training dummy. In any case, it's more than enough fame to hit all of your goals for now. After purchasing another level of daemonic liegelord, a champion slot, and finally the miniboss status you check to see your rewards. Daemonic liegelord now lets you purchase researchers, appropriate given your recent upgrades in the mage tower. Miniboss is far more exciting.

Miniboss
You are beginning to be considered a contender in your region. You and your champions no longer lose experience when slain, but still drop any held equipment.
New Dungeon Features

• Unlocks new rooms and cosmetic options.
• Unlocks new fame options.
• Additional liegelord levels available.
• You can now designate lieutenants. Lieutenants can level up like champions and can issue orders to your underlings, but cannot leave your dungeon. You can designate as many lieutenants as you have champions.

You survey your remaining options with what fame you have left, but it doesn't look like there's much more to buy in the near future.

Fame: 227
Promotion: Miniboss -> Boss (10,000 fame, missing requirements: 23/100 underlings, 5/20 minions, 1/2 champions, 0/2 lieutenants, 5/10 liegelord level, 9/15 character level)
Daemonic Liegelord: 5/15 (360 fame)
Expand Dungeon Claim Radius: 500m -> 1km (2,000 fame)
Summon Minion: 5/25 (50 fame)
Summon Greater Minion: 0/5 (250 fame)
Additional Champion Slot: (1 spent/1 available/2 max) (1000 fame) (requires liegelord level 10)
Additional Lieutenant Slot: (0 spent/0 available/2 max) (50 fame)

You summon a researcher, apparently a black abishai, and send it to discover basic enchanting and alchemical formulas. Another 100 fame goes to unlocking your two lieutenant slots, leaving you with 77 unspent fame. It looks as if your next promotion will be considerably harder to earn than your current one, not that that should come as any great surprise, so for the moment you plan to save up to see what greater minions are. You then find the nearest imp and issue a summons.

Soon after, Rishukan and the imp who you've begun to fondly think of as "the 'boooooooooooooooss' imp" stand in front of you. As much as your minions can be annoying at times, you can't deny that they were instrumental in the recent invasion, and you have a certain fondness for their antics. Besides, now that you've grown, it would be a shame if there wasn't at least one greater imp in the dungeon. You designate the two of them as your lieutenants, giving them formal control over their respective groups and naming the imp Baelzann.

Immediately after you confirm your choices, Baelzann explodes into a burst of flame, emerging as a greater imp uncannily similar to your old self. Meanwhile, Rishukan's limbs twist and grow until she towers over you, leaving a huge, 7ft tall hulking daemon not unlike a red bugbear with horns. Fortunately—or unfortunately—for you, the transformation does nothing to her vocabulary or antics, and next thing you know you've been placed on her shoulders and are taken for an impromptu and embarrassing piggy-back ride to whoops and cheers of "great master red" from her and her minions. Despite the altogether un-boss-like scene, you can't help but feel a strange satisfaction at the family you have here. It's amazing to think it was only a week and a half ago that you were hopelessly waiting in your cave for your next ****.