Within the core room on the fourteenth floor, Aby rested. Much of the night had passed by this point, and it had made changes and adjustments, before running the dungeon silently, using the rest of its attention to enjoy the scenery created by Sela. Then, it felt a burst of information, an important one. It reviewed its new allowance on floors, along with the ideas it had in mind, and was pleased to find enough leeway to create three floors this time.

What it didn’t take into account was Sela, awaking with a start as her bed, and the floor beneath, plummeted downwards. She took a moment, scrambling awake, to realize what was going on. Aby filled her in with more detail shortly thereafter, and she began to anticipate what the core would create.

Aby started with the fifteenth floor, continuing with the theme which had started on the fourteenth. A large, open space was created, then filled with soft fire corals and anemones. Wisps, jellyfish, crystals were introduced right after, and as the floor swiftly took on a red hue, the waters too started to warm. The crystals ate up the mana, vivid reds and playful oranges matching the crimson of the floors. The wisps played and danced around these crystals, darting in and out and taking hints of the mana contained within. The jellyfish too writhed and pulsed, but the floor was not dense with them this time. Instead, man-o-war floated to the surface, rising through the groups of jellies, dangling their tendrils to the very bottom of the floor. Gigantic Lions-Mane jellies swirled about through the center of the floor, trailing tentacles for dozens of meters, all the while the smaller jellies drifted about, often caught in the idle traps of these creatures.

As they bobbed and pulsed idly, Aby continued forcing the heat upwards. The surface of the waters started steaming, creating a thick fog in the air above. The wisps rejoiced, and the jellyfish proliferated. The fire corals were having trouble hanging on, but much as with the tenth floor, Aby forced them to continue growing. Then, the entire floor seemed to shift.

The wisps froze, before one of them rushed into the fire-coral it was playing around, the one in the very center of the floor.

Congratulations! Your creature “Fire Mana-Coral Polyps” has fulfilled a hidden condition(s), allowing to undergo a special evolution!

Conditions fulfilled:

Creator titles: Randomizer, Invasive, Adaptive, Ambitious

Merge with a Spirit of Fire

Special evolution available:

Flame Spirit-Coral Polyps

Mana corals are well known for their nature in producing vast quantities of mana, of all elements. Flame Spirit coral is similar, producing purely the most potent flaming mana, and with sufficient time, even spirits of flame.

This was not what the core intended, it had been aiming to create a second Personal Biome instead. It did allow it to occur all the same, simply disappointed that it was likely an area of these corals already existed elsewhere.

The soft orange coral swiftly changed, not much in shape or size, but becoming a rich red, making even the surrounding vibrancy appear dull in comparison. Most importantly, the coral was radiating, spewing forth both heat and mana with such intensity to shimmer and seemingly dye the waters with an ethereal red.

The crystals planted by it redoubled in their growth, and the wisps of the floor flocked toward it eagerly. It too rose up above the surroundings, becoming the rightful centerpiece of the floor, and any of the jellyfish that drifted too close to it were boiled away by its intense heat, and idea occurred to it to summon the wyvern to the floor, as it had seen him doing much the same with his own body in the fights earlier that day.

The wyvern begrudgingly woke up from its slumber, before yawning and stretching as he got up and absentmindedly swam downwards. He groggily passed through the floors one by one, though the latter half of the fourteenth floor served to snap him out of his haze, finding the overabundance of jellyfish just as unpleasant and detracting from the wonderful heat of the place as before. These grievances were alleviated when he entered the fifteenth, and found it to be incredible.

While the jellies still floated about idly, the room was enormous, open, and even hotter than the floor before. And, directly in the center was the most gorgeous coral the wyvern had ever seen. It practically begged for his presence, searing hot and saturated with fiery mana, it was everything he’d been slowly coming to enjoy.

Aby watched as the wyvern shook off his grogginess, and then rush towards the spirit coral. He circled around it, then rubbed one side against the soft coral, letting it roll around him slightly and envelop him in its scalding warmth. He seemed content to stay on this floor, finding it to be much more satisfying than the eighth, just as the wyrm had found the thirteenth closer to her own tastes.

Aby was pleased, watching the wyvern match the surrounding colors with his own radiant green, he begged to be noticed in a floor in which everything did the same, and moved to create the sixteenth and seventeenth floor. An entrance was placed on either side of the floor, one leading to a maze of sand and corals, filled with creatures of the Reef. It was a type of floor often seen within the dungeon, but Aby favored it nonetheless. With incredible diversity of life, and room for variation that comes along with that, it never failed to be a source of change and of knowledge for the core.

The other was a deep pit, dark and lonely. Aby connected the floor with the thirteenth, as well, allowing the creatures on that floor to funnel between and populate them both. Aby also spawned lanternfish, a curious baitfish with a propensity to glow. The core got the template for these fish through one of the invaders, it had been carrying around the corpses of baitfish and eating them occasionally, though Aby felt them better used for its own purposes.

Aby relaxed its concentration after it finished, allowing the creatures of the dungeon to come and explore the new floors. Of course, getting to and through the fifteenth floor proved to be a challenge for many of the less hardy creatures, and many a frozen reef fish found themselves stuck in the pulsating mass of stinging tendrils, or even overheating on the floor beneath should they not manage to adapt swiftly enough.

Those that did, however, swiftly found themselves changing to meet the demanding temperature, changing a deep red with more slender frames being typical amongst any fish that dared to call the floor home. Nothing outright evolved this time, something that surprised the core as it watched the fish swim in and out of the groves of corals, and the crustaceans wandering the rocky floor.

After finishing the three new floors, Aby decided to situate its core room in a tunnel connecting between the sixteenth and seventeenth for the time being, and then once more spread its attention throughout the halls. The absence of the wyvern on the eighth floor would likely be noticed, and the core moved to fill the resulting vacuum of power. Shoals of fish were formed to idle and wandering turtles and sharks added defense and offense to the floor. Reef and tiger sharks patrolled the waters while a few, more aggressive, bull sharks swam amongst the corals and crystals. Whilst it wouldn’t make up for the void left by the wyvern, it would hopefully keep the invading groups from becoming too complacent.

After this, the core went on to correct some minor things that arose during the creation of new floors. The time for yet another day of invaders was swiftly approaching, and the core was hoping to have things running smoothly enough to proceed forward with a few ideas it had the day prior.