The Third Floor; Begun

As soon as I’d received the message that I could Descend, I felt it. A glimmer of possibility, flitting around the edge of my consciousness. I could catch it, but only if I really wanted to. I felt a small burst of relief that I would get a small amount of time to plan out what I would want my third floor to be. More than that, I wanted the time to recover back to near full mana so I could implement that plan once I had it.

My first thought was to create a water based floor. Huntress was constantly growing, and she was starting to get large enough that some of the tunnels were almost too small. But I had to rule that out quickly. A quick look at the reservoir I’d made told me I wouldn’t have enough water for anything like a fully water based floor.

I was about to move on and start considering other possibilities before a thought struck me. I considered it for only a moment before expending a small amount of mana. Using stone and a small amount of water, I created a very small model of what my idea would create, to see if it would work.

Releasing the water, it slowly flowed through and filled the model, before flowing back out and completing the circuit I’d built. Slowly, the closest thing I could do to a smile formed. Maybe a water floor isn’t out of consideration after all…

I felt a desire to push ahead and just start. Instead, I forced myself to wait. Luckily I still had quite a bit of mana, so the wait wouldn’t take too long. I decided to fill the time with the slow process of drawing Earth mana from the emerald. My focus being taken up by the careful manipulations of mana.

A part of me kept watch over the dungeon, detached and simply observing. Keeping watch while my attention was focused on the powerful gem. The amount of mana I used to slowly gather and steal from the gem was just over half of my regeneration, letting my mana slowly creep back up even as I gathered more and more.

Hours later, I was still gathering a growing mass of Earth mana, the intensity growing more and more as it consolidated into the form I could use. My own mana, still slowly ticking upwards all the while. Finally, I decided it would be enough.

With a moment's thought and attention, I captured the small feeling of possibility, cracking it open and bringing it into myself. Moments later, familiar messages rolled through my mind.

Your Descent has begun!

Congratulations on completing your Second Dungeon Floor!

Please Select a Guardian Creature!

Kobold (Common) : A bipedal monster race, Kobolds are weak, but adaptable creatures. The tribes they form can turn into formidable powers given time and the right conditions. The dormant traces of draconic bloodline makes many laugh at the creatures, but should it awaken, a Kobold would find no laughter facing it.

Stone Slime (Common) : Slimes are among the most notoriously common and weak creatures. Their ability to adapt to any environment is oft looked over, as are the sometimes stunning adaptations they produce. The Stone Slime utilizes a hardening exterior to prevent it from harm, its usually weak membrane hardening into a semblance of stone for a short time.

Obsidian Hound (Rare) : The Obsidian Hound is a lackluster single combatant, but when in a pack, the Obsidian Hound can defeat even powerful enemies. Its sharp and tough fur allows it to shrug off many enemy strikes while its razor sharp obsidian fangs can rip through even weak stone. For all its short ranging speed, the Hound is actually quite limited in range due to its need for constant sustenance. It simply cannot afford extended chases.

Orthruan Serpent (Rare) : The rare Orthruan Serpent is often drawn to Dungeons with an affinity for serpentine creatures. With a powerful serpentine body and thick, regenerating scales it is an incredibly durable creature. Most notable however, is its two separate heads. While it lacks venom of any kind, the sheer power and regeneration it shows in combat make it a powerful fighter against any foe.

I’d thought to myself that the choice for the new Guardian Creature would be obvious- I’d thought that I would undoubtedly take the Orthruan Serpent, given its rarity and the ease with which it would fit into the existing food chain.

But this time something was different. Something was off ever so slightly. I could feel a slow, rhythmic pulsing from a small part of the golden script across my core’s surface. A tracework of the golden lines were glowing ever so faintly, drawing slightly more power than they were before. The glowing sigils were my title, Awakener.

Looking over the choices again, feeling the insistent pulse of my title, I found something I’d simply been skipping over. A part that I’d almost forgotten about when simply ruling the creature out. The possibility of awakening, of becoming something new, of becoming one with its ancestors.

After a split-seconds debate, I chose.

The golden light began to coalesce once more in front of my pillar. The glowing form slowly taking shape, taking form. As it began to fade, I could see flashes of dark grey scales, and gleaming white, sharp teeth. Grey eyes with a yellow core, the black pupil a sliver of darkness shot through the brilliant yellow.

Standing almost at five foot six, and quite broad and muscled, a Kobold finished appearing in front of my pillar. Dark grey scales spread across his body, making a tough but thin coat of protection. His hands and feet bore claws, sharp enough to cut and short enough to let him hold objects. His eyes were entirely normal to my mana-vision, simply brilliantly colored. And yet there was something about them that seemed to carry a deep, hidden power.

More than anything though, I was surprised by the breadth of connection between his mind and my own. It rivaled Huntress and Kyr’s own links with me. I could feel a sharp but still instinctive intelligence at the other end. I guessed that he wasn’t quite fully intelligent and awakened, but he was close. Maybe even the closest, though it was hard to tell between him, Huntress, and Kyr.

For a long, stretched out moment, he simply looked around the core room, taking in the surroundings he suddenly found himself in. As he looked around, his eyes stopped once on my own form, before falling to the ground in a gesture of respect. He also paused upon seeing the frozen over pool that was secreted to the side, containing the Elemental Egg.

Finally, he saw the dark tunnel entrance that led to the second floor. I could feel the dull sense of curiosity at what he was seeing. Before too long had passed the feeling of my Descent in progress reasserted itself. Quickly, I instructed the Kobold to step outside of the core room, taking a few steps into the second floor.

Mere moments later, I could again feel the same easy movement through stone. The way my core room would simply flow through the rock, letting me reposition it at the end of the dungeon with ease. Instead of descending, however, I simply shifted farther away from the second floor’s exit. I stopped once I had moved more than two hundred meters from the exit.

Finally, I began to direct the massive amount of Earth mana I had stored and was keeping under my control. A new tunnel began to form from the side of my core room, heading directly horizontal for only a few meters before beginning a steep slope downwards. Only a dozen meters of progress later, the tunnel slammed directly downwards, angling to the left.

Once the tunnel had reached almost three hundred meters below both my core room and the second floor, It evened out. The constant downwards progress coming to a halt, the stone instead being carved in a horizontal direction again. As the tunnel grew closer and closer to being below the second floor’s exit, I slowed down the speed of the carving. Slowly, I carved a strange, careful shape into the path of the tunnel, before it immediately rocketed back upwards. Once it was level with both my core room and the second floor once again, I simply connected it to the exit.

One of the biggest issues I’d thought of with a floor completely filled with water, would be ensuring it didn’t flood the connected floors. And while I couldn’t drown, I also didn’t see any reason to get my core room wet. Besides, Kyr liked spending time in my core room, and he could drown.

My design was simple, yet hopefully effective. When the room I would carve out became filled with water, it would fill upwards. And so, the second floor’s exit was in the upper right of the new floor, and simply curved upwards so the water level would eventually stop. I could do the same with the tunnel leading to my core, but I didn’t want any intruders to be able to simply swim across the top of the floor without having to actually go through it.

So instead, the tunnel leading to me was at the bottom of the room. Upon entering it, one would find it going sideways only a short time, before leading directly upwards. The tunnel would be filled with water all the way up, until it led to the steep slope and the eventually horizontal tunnel leading to me.

The only problems that remained, was carving out the actual third floor instead of just the tunnel connecting through it to the second floor. And after that, actually filling it with water. Luckily for the first problem, I still had hours worth of Earth mana remaining.

I quickly located the spots I’d decided to start from, and began slamming the Earth mana through the stone, grinding it away. This would be the largest single room I’d made yet, and I was determined to do it right. I watched with satisfaction as the otherwise tough rock and stone simply crumbled beneath the Earth mana.

Slowly, a chamber began to form between the second floor and my core room. It grew and grew, the walls expanding farther out, the space held within ever larger. Slowly, I began to run out of Earth mana I’d taken from the gem, almost half an hour later.

When I was finished, and the Earth mana was depleted, the third floor was empty. But it was there. A little over three hundred meters deep, slightly less than two hundred meters across, and almost another three hundred meters wide. It was a truly massive floor. And I needed to fill it with water. Quickly, I compared the space I needed to fill with the build-up in my reservoir. Luckily enough, I found that I could fill a little over a third of the the third floor with the built up water. Quickly, I carved a quick pipe through the stone for the water to drain down through.

At the same time, I began issuing commands to creatures in my first floor. Individual dead-end tunnels began having Glowmouths and Lampreys flooding out of them. As soon as each was empty, I connected them to the pipe, letting the water from those underwater tunnels drain downwards. Using this method, I quickly managed to fill the new third floor almost to two-thirds. With further instructions to my creatures, I disconnected the dead end tunnels from the pipe leading down and reopened them, allowing water to flood back into those now empty tunnels. On the surface of the ground floor, the water level of the rock pool suddenly shot down almost four meters. The high water level that usually fed the stream leading out of the first floor was removed. Quickly, the stream began drying up as its source, the rock pool, slowly began filling once more.

The third floor may not have been filled yet, but I wasn't ready to empty the majority of the first floor just to satisfy the voracious appetite for water it demanded. Instead, I began waiting once more. Luckily, when I'd designed the underwater tunnels for the first floor, the vast majority were over ten meters below the surface. This meant that the four meter drop in water level actually didn't dry up more than a few tunnels. Instead, It just required the stream coming from the cave system beyond to refill it slowly.

A number of hours later, the water level was starting to resemble something closer to normal. Unfortunately, there was still a third of the newest floor to fill. Once more, I had the dead end tunnels evacuated. This time, instead of one giant rush of water, I began emptying them one by one in case I didn't need to use them all. Overall, throughout the network on the first floor, I had over fifty dead end tunnels of varying sizes. Some were almost a dozen meters across, while others were at most one meter in diameter. As these began to empty downwards once more, the third floor's water level continued to rise.

Over half of the dead end tunnels were emptied by the time I found the water level to be satisfactory. Using as little mana as possible, I sealed off the pipe that had channeled water downwards. The reservoir began to collect water once more, and the rock pool again had its water level drop. Only a little more than two meters this time, but still enough to put an appreciable pressure on the stream flowing through the first floor. Nonetheless, I left the first floor to recover, allowing the creatures to resume their lives without interruption.

One thing I had immediately realized upon thinking of a underwater floor, was the need to provide a source of food for the Glowmouths. The Giant Glowmouth no longer ate the Flyants, but instead was having to jump slightly out of the water to drag down chunks of Bluecap Mushrooms to eat and digest. In a fully underwater floor however, there would be no place for such mushrooms to grow. But I did have a plan to deal with this. I'd guessed that something like what I was about to try was possible, simply based off of what I had seen from my creatures' evolutions.

Checking my mana to ensure it was close to full, I found a relatively flat part of the third floor's wall. Quickly, I softened it slightly and sprouted Bluecaps from it. Almost immediately, they began to drown in far too much water. Unluckily for those mushrooms, I wasn't ready to let it die that easily. I began just funneling mana into the plants, copying and replicating and recreating the parts of the mushrooms that were dying. Slowly, ever so slowly, I could see the color of the mushrooms begin to change. More and more of my mana rushed into the increasingly purple colored fungus. Not too long after that, I found the first one that was surviving entirely on its own, without my mana being forced to constantly replenishing the dying parts.

I felt a small jolt of excitement at the small success, but didn't let it distract me. As some of the plants died too quickly for me to save, I regrew new ones in their places. Almost three hours of this back and forth passed, with a seemingly endless cycle of dying and regrowing taking place within the fungi. Finally, another specimen that existed independently formed. But it was too different from the first to reproduce. And so I continued, forming more and more, and watching more and more die. Then another formed, and another, and another. And slowly, the gap between their differences began to close. Until finally, there were two that could reproduce.

Congratulations on your first created schema!

Aquatic Fungal Coral (Green)

Formed through countless cycles of life and death, this fungal coral is a hardy species. Developed by the Dungeon Core known as Sybas for underwater, the species is especially well-equipped for taking in their required nutrients from the water currents. Similarly, these water currents serve as the method through which their spores travel and spread. Due to the amount of breeding it took to create this species, it is extremely fertile and able to crossbreed with many variants of fungi.

Almost before I could take in the new information, I could feel the possibilities for this new coral creating more types. The many different forms of fungi that I had created over the course of finally reaching this species, all giving birth to new types of Aquatic Fungal Coral. And moments later, the messages began rolling through my mind. Variants for blue, yellow, red, purple, black, and white variants flowed through my thoughts, each with much the same descriptions.

Very suddenly, I had not just the one species of underwater fungi that I'd wanted, but many. Quickly, I began spinning colonies of these types of coral across the floor, walls, and ceiling. During my work, I noticed how odd the chamber looked with it being entirely empty. So even as I spun colonies of fungi, I began rising spires of stone out of the floor and ceiling, reaching through the waters. Bigger outcroppings of stone soon joined these spires, emerging from the floor and ceiling as well, but from the walls too. Throughout these spires and outcroppings I wove tunnels and smaller cut off sections, to give nesting places and safe places from larger predators. In the very walls themselves, I dug out similar nesting places. And while I would be moving Huntress to here, I didn't create her den yet. I would let her choose where to put it herself.

By the time my work was finished, the room was aglow with color. The yellow, white, and green varieties of coral were hard, and needed to be chipped or broken. The blue, red, and purple versions were softer, able to have chunks easily nibbled away. Oddly enough, the black version was very different from the others. While the aquatic coral in some cases resembled the mushrooms shapes of the original Bluecaps, they had mostly taken on more condensed and solid shapes. The harder coral tended to disk or cup shapes, with the softer varieties resembling the mushroom cap shape more. The black coral however, was stringy and linked together only at the base. The tendrils of coral stretching out into the currents for up to half a meter in length before stopping.

More than that, but they had all inherited the Bluecap's slight bioluminescence. The floor was literally aglow. A dim, multicolored light suffused the waters. Even without any inhabitants yet, the floor seemed almost alive.