I never expected that three skills that could truly be called absolutely overpowered would appear at the same time.
Chain Explosion: After the Explosive Mother-Child Tree dies, it can continuously trigger explosions. The range of each subsequent explosion increases by 20% over the previous one, and damage rises by 10%. Each selection of this skill stacks one additional explosion count. Current stack count: 0.
Flame Seed Burial: The Explosive Mother-Child Tree’s attacks can bury explosive flame seeds inside targets. When the mother tree dies, the seeds detonate, dealing damage equal to half of the Explosive Mother-Child Tree’s explosion damage.
Explosive Burst: Every time the Explosive Mother-Child Tree’s mother tree loses 33.3% of its health, it automatically detonates all child trees and triggers their passive effects upon detonation.
Chain Explosion not only boosted the Explosive Mother-Child Tree’s damage but also supplied the one thing it lacked most—an expanded explosion radius.
What’s more, it was a stackable selectable skill.
If I picked this skill again later, it would be just like a nuclear reactor going critical, a full chain-reaction serial explosion. The scene would be unimaginably gorgeous.
The second skill, Flame Seed Burial, directly expanded the Explosive Mother-Child Tree’s offensive options. It turned every profession it hit into a one-shot fire mage, and the self-destructing kind at that.
If an attacked player wasn’t careful and accidentally wandered into the backline where the squishies were, it would be pure devastation.
The last skill looked somewhat ordinary at first glance, but that wasn’t the case at all. Normally an Explosive Mother-Child Tree’s mother tree could only have one child tree. Most players would simply bypass the child and focus the mother, leaving the mother with no counterplay.
Besides detonating the child on death to trigger its passive—pulling the nearest player within ten yards to its side with vines when its health hit zero.
With this skill, the Explosive Mother-Child Tree finally gained real means to fight back against players instead of remaining purely passive.
While I hesitated between these three skills, my peripheral vision suddenly caught the Sturdy Root System skill I had chosen at the very beginning.
Tree Drill, Penetration, Explosive Fear, Sturdy Root System… Right, these skills could all combo perfectly together. Add in Tree-like Division and there would be nothing to worry about.
I arranged the Shadow Swamp with meticulous care, and a flash of inspiration suddenly hit me. Without the slightest hesitation I selected Explosive Burst as my fourth skill. Not only that, I split my Shadow Swamp into eight separate segments. Every mother tree was placed at the rear of each segment, with one child tree left beside each mother as a guard and the second child tree positioned at the front of each segment using Sturdy Root System’s 800% maximum distance effect.
The eight segments connected seamlessly, so that the mother trees in the middle seven sections each had two child trees orbiting them. Aside from the final segment’s Explosive Mother-Child Tree, the layout appeared designed only to let the child tree at the front of the first segment draw players in as much as possible.
In reality, I had far deeper considerations in mind, though the exact results would only be known once the players actually encountered it.
Still, I felt absolute confidence. Yes, the kind of confidence that would torment them until they wanted to die.
With that, the Shadow Swamp section was completely finished. Under this setup, the Explosive Mother-Child Trees were more than enough to handle things here. The other monsters might still gift players some Evil Spirit Points since they hadn’t been reinforced.
On my side I had selected only a few monsters with special effects and placed them beside the mother trees, such as the Shield Dominator Beast that could heavily block physical damage and the Corrupted Undead that could restore health to surrounding monsters, indirectly boosting the mother trees’ survivability.
Although I was having a blast with the DIY, I hadn’t forgotten the most important point. Even if the Shadow Swamp layout I had built was disgustingly difficult to clear, it would all be meaningless if players simply chose not to enter from this route.
Therefore, to lure players onto the torment route, the other areas needed to be designed even nastier than this one.
Yet it was obvious that after finishing the Shadow Swamp, my Evil Spirit Points were almost completely spent. Under such tight constraints, how could I possibly make the design even more revolting?
Unless I borrowed some from Yiyi or Kiria. But that would clearly be too embarrassing, since I had just boasted that I would solve their problems for them. Plus those two little girls were still in the newbie stage; even what I had might not be enough for myself.
If I borrowed points and that caused their side to become the players’ breakthrough point, it would be a total loss.
So, I still had to rely on myself.
Could I torment the players without using monsters as much as possible?
I muttered to myself, sinking into deep thought as I tried to recall any similar examples I could draw from—special-mechanism monster gathering spots, complicated dungeons, or even some twisted quest lines.
One method eventually came to mind—hidden paths.
Simply put, it meant concealing the actual passable routes and luring players onto the wrong ones.
In my previous life, a certain temperate-zone country had designed a large dungeon’s nightmare difficulty exactly this way. Using plot content and psychological manipulation to guide players, even the guilds’ final raid progress had once been stuck at roughly halfway because they simply could not find the correct route.
Back then the forums had exploded with discussion, and several professional推理 hobbyist groups had even conducted in-depth plot analyses of the dungeon.
Obviously I didn’t have time right now to design an entire plot sequence. Even if I handed it over to Kashalia, it would probably take at least several days just to outline a rough framework, since the original dungeon’s story had reportedly required more than ten famous novelists working together.
But hiding paths didn’t necessarily require plot misdirection; there were simpler methods.
For example, designing multiple fake routes and concealing the real one inside them could waste players’ time just as effectively.
Destructible walls.
In the trap category I found this item that could disguise itself as any beneficial prop. With the exact number of points I needed right in front of me and the remaining items I still possessed, a wicked smile immediately spread across my face.
Thus, under my design, the areas on both sides of the Shadow Swamp completely transformed into a game called “Find the Correct Route.” The already complicated Gloom City Ruins space, further enhanced by the event effects, only helped my layout.
At the same time I completely blocked every visible path within the area and hid the correct route inside “destructible walls,” making it impossible for players to tell the difference from the surface and forcing them to destroy them. Yet even then, there was still a high chance they would enter the wrong routes.
What awaited them then would not only be dead-end walls but also all kinds of terrifying traps or swarms of monsters.
Even if they sometimes stumbled upon an unblocked route, it didn’t mean they had luckily found the correct one, because in my design I had deliberately routed several paths straight into the neighboring Shadow Swamp.
No, it still wasn’t enough. I needed to make it even nastier.
After thinking for a moment, I added Shadow Swamp terrain to some of the correct routes as well. Of course these were only short segments and wouldn’t cost many points.
Imagine it: you finally discover a passable route, step inside, and suddenly realize you have entered the “next-door” Shadow Swamp. You hurriedly switch to another path, only to find Shadow Swamp again on the other side, falling into an endless loop of doubt.
After all, players had no God’s-eye view; they had no idea which route was actually correct.
Naturally, the meticulous me did not forget to station a few Explosive Mother-Child Trees inside these “Shadow Swamps” as well. In such cramped spaces, I believed these children would produce absolutely devastating results.
Next, let’s welcome our victims onto the stage. Please give them a round of applause.