Testing. Testing. Hey Innearth can you hear me? Just checking in - nothing much has happened yet. I'm in the middle of a forest! Saw some massive monsters but nothing dangerous for me yet. One bit me but don't worry I got better.

I'll check in again soon okay? I wish I built something to measure how far I've gotten, I've been walking for days. Anyways, think that's all. Till next time.

Excerpt obtained from an Onyx transmission 2000 AS.

Just as Innearth tried to puzzle out his mental state, a second group moved through the portal and distracted him.

This group was comprised of three nearly identical humanoid creatures. They each wore billowy tunics of red, had an identical short baton of an item and constantly swapped places with one another. They were probably closest to being humans however their skin was a deep pink and their eyes a startling purple. Kobolds?

Unlike the previous group, these three had completely separate roles and did not stray from their positions…however they all looked basically the same and the way they kept teleporting between one another muddied the whole deal.

A quick summary of the positions could be seen as “defence, movement, offence”.

The adventurer that was better at defence would appear and deflect a void trap spider right before it skewered one of the others – their pole-shaped item sliding out in a double fan to make a shield shape for a single moment then retracting once more.

They would then shimmer slightly as their position was perfectly swapped and the “offensive” adventurer took their place. This adventurer used the same item by spinning it outwards into a polearm shape and slashing in figure eight patterns. Every time they were in position, the rod would extend out briefly and cut all that dared to attack them before retracting.

The third adventurer could also be considered an attacker but one that “attacked” with less ferocity and more agility. Using the flat of their double-tipped short blade to wound before dashing around and attacking from a new angle. They would appear to skip slightly and blur with momentary speed as they flowed into a new position or away from a fight.

They had a "gimmick" but played it well. Instead of appearing to be a single adventurer flipping between three styles, they were three adventurers in three separate places attacking simultaneously and “flipping between each other” instinctively.

As they progressed and Innearth watched them religiously with his mana sight he started to realize they weren’t physically teleporting but somehow sharing bodies. Their souls were what was swapping bringing their skills and who knows what else between them.

…to be honest. I don’t know if that is more or less impressive. How hard is it to do? And how are they able to do it so well? You’d think they would show some sign of disorientation in the swap.

The group continued to work backwards through his magma halls. That was okay for the most part, but the backwards progression meant the group had full reign of the retreating shortcuts and broke or bypassed the majority of his forward-facing traps or puzzles. The worst two offenders were the pair puzzle room that simply opened from the back letting the group wander through interested and the maze which had a straightforward series of one-way shortcuts when approaching from this direction.

The most memorable fight was when the group reached “Death Knight Randy” and his various zombie rodents and mammals – Innearth’s mini boss for the magma halls.

They dodged and deflected most of the deadly attacks just fine, but found as a group they had the same amount of difficulty damaging the undead. Quick slashes and stabs strong enough to pierce the zombies were employed repeatedly over the course of the fight. However, despite slicing off limbs and completely impaling the monsters, the undead kept re-attaching their broken limbs, less healing the damage and more just ignoring it.

As strong as the adventurers are in their roles, they don’t seem to have much elemental damage. If they had skills, or spells, or items, or anything that dealt life or fire damage, they would have a much easier time with this.

Finally, after nearly 20 minutes of struggle, the group finally pinned Randy to the wall. Two spears were used on the boss’s two ends anchoring it in place while the third ripped out and flung death crystals about the room.

The trio gathered around the corpse exhausted as their reward appeared.

A single translucent and fragile looking amulet appeared and Innearth watched and tried to figure out what it did based upon context.

The amulet gave off a warm stream of life mana that looped throughout the body of whoever was wearing it healing them at a constant low but endless rate.

When directed the “streams” of life could be pooled into a weapon or item and applied life-based damage to whatever was hit by it…Useless in most scenarios but helpful in specific cases like what the group had just gone through. This amulet would have allowed one of them to rip through the undead had they had it beforehand.

All three adventurers had tried it out swapping around to see how it felt.

They don’t seem that happy. Is it because it's now asymmetrical? They want two more amulets? I only gave one random item to this boss and I’m not sure that lets them get 3 identical items…not my fault the system decided this is what they needed the most.

As the group wandered away from the death mana-infused room Innearth set about remaking the monsters inside. The biggest bonus with using undead was their ease of reuse – simply slap all the scattered flesh together with death mana and pull the hovering undead souls back into the slightly worse off containers. This was as good a time as any to upgrade the group. All the zombies were partly made into death knights like Randy – small black armour items covering the worst of their wounds and lined with death crystals that helped hold them together. Randy was “fixed” in a similar way but then improved with unlife materials that spiralled around the inside of its armour.

Give the adventurers a weapon to fight the undead and then give the undead a way to block the weapon. Ah…perfect.

This was as good enough of a time to check on how his attempt at remaking the 3rd zone boss was doing.

Going back a bit in Innearth’s timeline to right after the high level scouts cleared his crystal dragon, Innearth had been incredibly relieved the adventurers didn’t loot the dragon's corpse when they left.

It was fully within their right as the victors but…it would have been sad to design a new boss after he had set up plans for this one. Some dungeons swapped their bosses semi-regularly but Innearth wanted key setups to remain the same.

At this point, Innearth employed a technique he didn’t use very often due to it being more trouble than it was worth – reusing monster parts.

He hadn’t tried to reuse parts since his new “system-aided creation panel” had been given and it definitely helped make the process more straightforward.

First Innearth moved the whole corpse into his panel as a material and convinced the stubborn panel to give him its damage. Unable to manipulate the already solidified flesh Innearth instead began performing surgery. Cutting and ripping out most of the unrepairable sections before pulling them out of the panel and tossing them in a corner for his cleanup crew.

The most important part of the monster might just have been its skull – now fused perfectly to its thankfully only slightly damaged head. The ancient bones inside of it were what had made the monster unique and despite no visible effects having stemmed from it…Innearth was nearly positive he needed to keep it to make a similar feeling monster. I think the domain might have been because of this skull but I can’t prove that.

The most damage had been done with the shattered mana circuit of the beast. Lightning mana had forcefully traveled up and down pathways exploding nodes and forcefully creating “paths of least resistance” by melting them to flesh and fusing them to bones.

Most of it was unrepairable and while there was a non-zero chance they might make interesting unique monsters or add new effects…Innearth also saw the ways they weakened everything and decided it was best to start over.

Dododoo. Innearth slowly sorted through parts while examining the materials through his panel. This section is reparable but it would take more time doing so than remaking it…so it has to go. This part was completely undamaged…it can stay.

The percentage of the monster Innearth decided to salvage was close to 30%. He probably could have gotten more out of it, but he was getting lazy as time went on. It was enlightening staring at the corpse under the microscope that was his panel.

I shaped this whole creature myself so it's pretty obvious the parts that are different from what I remember making. I…I can’t really believe I’ve never looked this closely at the finished product before. Sure the panel is zooming in further than I can do so myself but still. Some of these changes are pretty obvious.

His crystal muscles were layered, "stretched football-shaped sacs of liquid crystal" that could expand and detract in one direction, while resisting force in the other. They also contained tiny specks of kinetic and gravity crystals in an alternating pattern. That was what he had designed and while the essence of that was still here…now the inner liquid seemed to fuse to the ends and force the polarity to always stay in that long direction. Mana seemed to have stretched out inside the liquid-like thousands of invisible strings running through the muscle – grains of mana that helped strengthen it. Finally, the speck of crystals had been almost melted into the center of the liquid crystal and it was hard to see where they had begun and ended.

The bones were similarly fused to the surrounding flesh in ways that Innearth didn’t remember physically doing when he designed the monster. Hollow metal mana and gravity bones now had faint grains and small pockets that were attached to the surrounding flesh in an uneven pattern.

Despite being made out of just iron and metal mana the bones now had an invisible grain of several different alloys like someone had marbled various greys silvers and browns and turquoise on a microscopic scale. They all structurally gave the material a slightly better strength in the specific positions that mattered. It was almost like the spell had airbrushed Innearth’s creation fuzzing everything slightly when it completed his design.

It’s annoying to do this, but for an experimentation it’s worth it.

Innearth absorbed bits of the cut-off flesh – adding the materials to his inventory and letting the still lingering mana be ripped off and added to the floor. As previously discovered, there was a majority of the physical elements that Innearth had used initially – quartz for muscles, iron for bones – but when absorbing it, trace elements appeared alongside these bases. Inside the bones depending on where he absorbed from, he could find: Ruthenium, Osmium, and even Mercury for some reason – all ripped out and separate as the magic holding them in whatever state they were in was removed. The muscles similarly had plenty of random materials from argon at 0.1% to carbon at 0.5% of the total.

I think it's probably always been obvious – but I was kind of imagining the materials as being a soup of these elements all mixed together, when it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. I’m reminded of the mess of compounds that showed when I tried to break apart a leaf. I can’t even tell what it’s doing in its magical state…

…It’s probably not something I should focus on directly. I don’t need to know the end components when the spell does that for me. What I do want to know is if there’s any way I can design stuff that will help the spell out…or direct what the spell is doing so its changes are stronger or more in line with what I want.

Random thought that’s spinning back to what I know about spells. Is the structure of the material in any way related to my intent? So if I make a bone and think this is to help protect it the magic will work towards making it better at protecting? That sounds about right.

Anyways. Moving on. Let’s fill in the dragon and see if it works.

The ripped-off sections were all sent off to the crystal dwarves to make into items and Innearth went to work remaking the main body.

A slight hiccup appeared when he tried to figure out how to make the middle a “shrunk” zone again. He couldn’t get it to work inside of his panel and then trying to make it outside of the panel and “shove it in afterwards” broke the whole construct.

Forcing it unravelled the carefully shrunk space and flashed my panel in a warning manner…I guess that makes sense. I can’t figure out how to put shrunk voids inside of shrunk voids without breaking the weaker of the two… But then again just because I couldn’t do it I didn’t realize the system wouldn’t be able to do it. And also…what does that mean about the space this panel is in. Is it shrunk somehow? Or is it a bigger on the inside sort of deal with space mana?

I should see if I can find anything about how Space and Void mana interact in terms of shrunk or expanded areas. Do they break each other? If someone with an expanded dimensional storage walks through my shrunk hallways will it break their constructs?

Innearth tried to find information first on the market and then by asking Doc.

The current/ “newest information” seemed to be that dimensional spaces – either shrunk or grown – could interact if made by multiple different people and different spells… but not if done by the same person…for some reason?

So an adventurer could take a bag made with runes through a dungeon-shaped hallway just fine but if Innearth had the space affinity and made a bigger on the inside bag it would break when passing through his own stuff. More generally using the same rune bag example you couldn’t put one similar rune bag inside of the other without breaking them. You could however cheat and nest a script bag inside a rune bag inside a dungeon’s expanded room.

That doesn’t make sense. Why would mana punish the same person doing it? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? If they all belong to the same person it's fine, but if other people do it, it breaks?

Anyways.

Finishing up the design Innearth gave life to his crystal boss once more and set about making sure they could escape at the end of the fight in the future.

…

Meanwhile, the trio of adventurers travelled through his dungeon all the way to the surface and then disappeared for several hours. Innearth loved watching them travel but while they struggled a bit in the magma halls, they quickly became overleveled in the beginner area. Watching them shrug off all the traps and overkill the weaker monsters wasn’t very fun.

When they returned the trio seemed excited – rushing through Innearth’s defences on the way back up no longer being able to take the “retreat” paths and being forced to actually go through his challenges.

They seemed incredibly annoyed by the maze while trying to return to the portal zone and got stuck in the twin puzzle rooms for ages. Unable to communicate properly they stuck to swapping back and forth in the rooms so they could see both sides repeatedly.

The silverfish key was chased about for over 15 minutes – leaving Innearth giggling before it was finally caught and inserted into a lock. The group made sure to slow down and watch for traps as they made their way back through.

Finally they reached the final boss for the magma halls.

This was a strangely balanced matchup. Each of the 3 spider sisters went after a different adventurer they were better suited to beat – and then the adventurers swapped and threw the bosses off their game.

Come again? This time maybe head up like the other group. I think you’ll find the crystal caverns are to your liking!

…

Like a hole in a humanoid dam being pried further and further apart by the pressure of the people on the other side, more and more adventurers poured through the gate. Pairs, trios, whole troupes of adventurers came through. At first it seemed like curiosity drove them and it looked like he was equalizing adventurers with Doc. But then groups came by with increasingly complex and bulky equipment and the flow increased.

Machines were brought to scan the area around his entrance...and then when they didn't seem able to figure out what they were trying to discover, a second stream of even more complicated equipment was transported through. Innearth’s Snake Scout lived up to his scout moniker and relayed the whole proceeding, watching as a huge array was formed in the center of the Valley.

This setup seemed to surprise excite and attract the adventurers in doves.

Within weeks Innearth started to get nearly hourly groups of adventurers on escort quests bringing very obviously non adventuring "dead weight" through his dungeon – ignoring his upper floors and simply transporting them to his entrance and retreating.

At first and for quite a few months after this flow started, Innearth was simply excited to see the creatures actually travel through him. He let them travel through all the "retreat" paths or shortcuts upwards – knowing they would have to face his traps and monsters on the way back to the forest gate...

Lining up with this period, multiple monsters started to ascend nearly at once – 3 of the weaker crystal dwarves that had been silently chugging away advanced within a day of each other. They went through a fast tracked version of what Oynx had gone through – ascending into kobolds and naming themselves Ilmenite, Rutile, and Steve. The three brothers seemed interested in learning about where Oynx had gone but settled down in his dungeon for now – replacing the strongest non ascended dwarf as the most important crafters.

In the very bottom of his floor, two of the prehistoric riders advanced and deserted the shrew and its war. They preferred not to receive names and simply decided to explore by heading slowly up to the surface and sneaking out the lighthouse entrance.

Because of the novelty of the situation – and because of his new children – the travellers took a while to get on Innearth’s nerves.

But…as time went on – with the majority of groups ignoring his upper floors – and with high-level adventures slaughtering his weaker monsters efficiently and travelling up through the same paths they had decided were “optimal” and the shortest…

As adventurers ignored his deeper floors...those initial feelings finally started to fade.

I should be a destination, not just a "pit stop". I should be a challenge that adventurers have to face...it should be more lucrative to delve into me than escort random boring weakling through me. I need more. I need to fix this!