We’re now at book 3, Laios’s guild is exploring 4th level, the Flooded Level, and get to an entrance for the 5th near the end of the book. We get another beautiful example of monster ecology on how food chain dynamics can affect a dungeon. Read on and you’ll see what I mean.

• The book start strong as we see Corpse Retrievers in action. Corpse Retrievers specialize in finding dead adventurers, revive them with magic and charge them accordingly. Their work is obviously useful to adventurers but as their source of income depends on their eventual deaths, they’ll keep surviving tips for themselves…
• The main monsters of the Flooded Level are the Bladefishes, Krakens, Tritons, Kelpies, Moray Eels, Mermaids, Slimes, Tentacles and Undines
• One can counter a Mermaid’s song if they sing very loudly (and lousily?) themselves, that’s creepy and that’ll make them flee
• A lot of Bladefishes means too few middle of food chain monsters, which means too many top of food chain monsters, which means at this Level: Krakens

• Krakens are colossal and have giant 3′ long Parasites inside their flesh, don’t eat Giant Parasites, they have their own parasites and you’ll get gastro-intestinal troubles
• We learn that giving back life to a corpse (resurrection if you will) work only inside the dungeon as it’s a feature of the magic curse of the Golden Kingdom: souls are chained to their bodies even in death, so in essence you just have to heal a body so it can function as the soul never departed
• Undines are water spirits, they’re spheres of water that shoots deadly water jets. They’re made of magic, a magic-user can drink them (once they’re defeated) to get back depleted magic.
• One way to the Fifth Level (it’s implied that there’s others) is going down through a non-flooded tower that barely jut out of the water
• It’s infested with tentacles (Japanese love their tentacles, don’t they). Tentacles can strangle somebody and are poisonous. At least one variety hides inside traps mechanisms, good news is that it hinders the trap. Bad news it that an unsuspecting adventurer that tries to disarm a trap can get caught by the tentacle…
• Giant Frogs are immune to the tentacles and live among them, a good example of monster commensalism

Book 4 Here