I had levelled. Unsurprising, considering the sheer amount of death that had happened around me in the last few hours. In fact I was already half way to the next as well.

You have reached Fourth Level.

You may now choose an Attunement. On reaching sixth level, you will have the opportunity to attain higher levels in the Attunements you have already chosen.

You may choose to receive an additional Schema Slot OR an expansion to your Mana pool OR The Great Wheel’s Whim (I).

Without hesitation, I sought through the ‘selection space’ my mind entered when I focused on the notification, finding and picking out the Attunement of Gleam for myself. It was a path I’d committed to by selecting Gloom and I had no intention of backing out now.

Secondly, I selected Mana Pool Expansion. It was long overdue and I was finally starting to regularly run into the limits of my current reserve, thanks to my efforts in building foodchains throughout the Dungeon.

A regular trickle of Mana returned to me as I seeded populations and they bred on their own, as they fought and hunted each other. Hundreds of creatures were all fighting tooth and nail to thrive in the world I had built. It was fascinating just to watch them, to see chains of vicious little ants overwhelm a toad, or a pitched battle between a viper and a reelfish, the snake caught in the fish’s clutches and struggling with all its might to avoid being pulled down into a watery grave.

At every given moment, hundreds of these little pictures of life and death were unfolding. Aphids with crystalline bodies clustering on a flower made of glass. Vipers lying in wait. Schools of bright silver fish swimming in unison. The steady drip of water from the cavernous ceiling where nacre-spiders lurked.

I felt proud of the beauty I had achieved.

Gemheart Dungeon (Unnamed) Soul Fragments 228/400 Mana 7.8/132 Mana Per Hour +0.4 Anima: 1 Logos: 2 Arcana: 2 Blessings: Gift of Beauty, Gift of The Sun. Prone to strange and reckless thinking, this aesthete Dungeon has survived numerous deadly situations in its young life and attracted the attention of the gods.

But there was still some ugly business to attend to.

My jaunt outside the Dungeon had consequences. The storms that had shaken my field of ethereal Mana had caused several creatures to mutate violently. Most of them were already dead. A few, however, had survived.

What made me curious was that they had immediately fled my territory, as if afraid of me.

The only one that remained was a mutated Nemocelia, a swollen mushroom twice its normal size with a pinkish color to its translucent limbs. It had grown a number of long, prehensible tubes that oozed digestive bile, and was hungrily spraying anything that moved. It was an interesting hunting strategy except that the creatures died too slowly- by the time the bile had killed them they had already run away, robbing the carnivorous mushroom of its meal.

But more interesting than how it had changed physically, it had also begun to warp the Mana around it.

Usually when a creature died within my Dungeon it was eaten by me, rendered down into pure Mana and, if it wasn’t one of my own creations, fragments of soul. The actual predator was sustained not by the meat but by a small tithe of Mana it took from me. Over time this would accumulate until the predator reached evolution.

Importantly, I couldn’t seem to induce evolution simply by pouring Mana in myself. Mana ‘donated’ by me could change a being’s shape, but it would slowly grow more and more resistant, taking more Mana to make further changes. I had made the rough observation that this was because each creature carried a ‘memory’ of its original form in the way Mana flowed within its body.

A rat I made double in size would still have the same Mana pathways as when it was small. Evolution by contrast carved entirely new pathways, creating a comprehensive change.

The mutated mushroom had no pathways at all. In fact it had no Mana at all.

It was like a bottomless hole, drinking and drinking the surrounding Mana down, but never filling in the least. It was a blight on my Dungeon.

Unfortunately, neither Argent nor Izzis could come close for risk of its deadly spit. I was on the verge of calling Aurum up from his den when, inside his chrysalis of amber, Adamant began to stir.

The frozen light that had surrounded him faded away, leaving only a thin haze in the air. The Adamant that now stood before me was only four feet tall, but undeniably better shaped than I had been able to make him, with a full five fingers on each hand, his limbs shaped to imitate the presence of muscle and bone structure beneath his skin of ochre clay. There was even the suggestion of a helmet atop his head, a pointed helm with a cross-shaped visor.

Stepping forward, he planted his heavy foot down on the troublesome mushroom.

With that, I was finally able to turn my attention to more interesting matters.

Outside, an encampment had sprung up on the shores of the lake, drawn by the promise of the golden mangrove fruit. The poor, the hungry, they cast their tents up and waited in the mud, none of them willing to be the first to go forth; the rumors of giant spiders and worse had them hesitating. Even from here they could see the giant curtains of spun silk hanging from the tree branches and billowing in the wind.

As I watched through Argent’s eyes a lone canoe paddled across the lake. The two oarsman each carried swords, but the old man sitting at the front was unarmed except for a torch. His flame reflected in shining flecks across the bobbing surface of the waters. They stopped their boat just short of where the roots of the mangrove trees formed a false ‘shore’ and the old man began to chant, drawing symbols in the air, his torch flaring up as the fire turned colors to a brilliant blue.

Reaching out, he touched the flame to the spiderwebs strung between the trees and they flared up- but the fire spread no further, only consuming the silk without harming the forest itself. The man wove his spellwork into the blaze, drawing golden letters in the air and throwing them into the flames like he was feeding the fire with tinder.

The web-weavers panicked and retreated deeper into the forest, but the fires only spread and chased after them. In the open the fisherman spiders were not especially deadly combatants. They had the strength to wrestle fish from the waters in their nets, but they were clumsy and slow, easily fended back with spears or swords before they could close the distance to grapple.

But, as I watched, a brave little jumping spider crawled across the highest branches, scuttling between leaping tongues of flame. It was of the other species I had made to guard the mangrove orchard, a small but fiercely venomous breed.

As the mage chanted and all eyes were on the fires slowly eating their way through the dense webs that guarded the precious golden fruit, the little spider leapt down into the boat.

And everything went upside-down.

The little spider landed directly on oarsman’s face, setting the man screaming and stumbling, his back foot kicking against the side of the ship and making it rock dangerously in the water. He clawed the spider off his face and hurled it away, but not before it had bitten him twice, once on the hand and once just above the eye. He curled onto his knees in agony, screaming as he clutched the swelling redness of his face.

And meanwhile, beneath the boat, my reelfish were beginning to swarm. They watched the little craft rock and tilt and saw weakness; their prey was already in distress. With a huge thump the largest of the reelfish smashed its head into the ship’s side, and as the man aboard grabbed the railings to support themselves, one impact after another landed, the whole swarm battering the canoe until with a sudden lurch it flipped over-

Three splashing, struggling bodies went into the water. The wounded man never came up again.

The surviving oarsman clutched desperately to the upturned boat, sword already lost in the waters below, reelfish tendril winding around his kicking legs. His fingernails scraped over the slippery surface of the boat’s underbelly as he was dragged under.

The mage was desperately trying to cast a spell as he went down, clawing golden letters from the air as if they were his lifeline. He was pulled under, but turned on his attackers, throwing out a blast of searing light that flared like a drowned star under the lake, forcing the shadows of the reelfish back and killing the one that had seized him.

He surfaced again, skinny limbs kicking up the water as he paddled for shore.

But it was already over.

It wasn’t long before he went under again. This time for good.

I was only upset that they’d all died outside my domain. I was forced to watch from Argent’s body, the rat perched atop the great black tree that guarded the breach in my walls, as three perfectly good souls were wasted.

Trying not to be too upset about the loss, I was briefly amused to see a familiar figure slowly paddling through the water. When I had first created the creatures of the orchard, I had also created a lone turtle, imbuing it with Mana as a prize for the first predator to crack open its shell.

Only the clever creature had survived, apparently. It was nearly twice the size it had been when I last took notice, its shell covered in dull, squared spikes.

Which told me something rather interesting. Previously, I had only fed Mana to creatures with a purpose in mind, shaping their body to one end or the other. But by placing unshaped Mana into a living being, I could cause it to evolve ‘naturally’.

This was useful because there were still many things I couldn’t do. Most of the ‘freak’ creatures I had created to sell at market were short-lived and ill-functioning. The winged serpent lacked the musculature to fly and the golden fish couldn’t do more than sluggishly inch along the bottom of its bowl.

Allowing creatures to grow outside of my will was one way to introduce more diversity to my little world.

Speaking of which, I had two perfectly good golem cores, and no intention of wasting time in making some new friends for Adamant.