ZeMadDoctor: Well… it's pretty obvious A is the best choice no?

Innearth: Listen I think C is much more versatile. It has a lot of potential...and A is just bad in general.

Abe: …so hear me out guys. B.

ZeMadDoctor: I figured A has the most obvious benefit. We get stronger even with the conversion rate its experience directly to use – I don’t know about you, but 13k experience is a level and a bit for me. It's not that I’m incredibly attached to this option. But I figured it’s the simplest. There's a clear cause and effect. We do some work. We get the benefit. Simple and easy option.

Innearth: We can gain levels ourselves just by continuing what we are doing. Experiment make new creatures? Get experience. Grow our dungeon? Get experience. Churn monsters against adventurers? Get experience. Option C on the other hand!

Innearth: With option C we could raise up a single monster! The snake scout was MVP just then we can give them our experience and try to make them a dragon! This part is a harder sell but I want to give it to an adventurer to try and turn them into a god and this would be perfect!

Abe: Absolutly not. Hard line right there I refuse to give freebies. Experience must be earned – any power must be worked for yourself I refuse to just hand our work over to some adventurer.

Innearth: I know that parts a hard sell but listen. We wouldn’t just be giving it away for free... it could be a bonus to clearing the facility or something. A nice reward to try and attract strong adventurers from far and wide.

Abe: That’s…not as awful as freebies...but still feels like a complete waste of this choice. Listen, the system rewards hard work right? If the adventurer wants experience they just have to continue doing what they were doing just like we are. I’d prefer A to C honestly and A is hot garbage.

ZeMadDoctor: I don’t have a strong opinion on it. If both of you don’t like A I’ll drop it. Why do you want to make a god Innearth? Is that just an experiment? Seems completely out of the blue.

Innearth: Its…just a goal I have. I’ll…ish. That “I want to make a god” message kind of slipped out give me a second.

Innearth: Check this site out in your spare time. If you get past its barrier we can talk more about that. Just know it would be really really useful in the goal I have. Like it’s the first real solution I’ve seen. And high level adventurers have a grind… being able to help them with levels would be immensly useful.

Innearth: I feel like as a facility reward… it would draw them faster than simply some high tiered equipment. Also you’re ignoring the first thing I mentioned what about rising up specific monsters? We could try and ascend the roach knight! Or the facility core!

Innearth neglected to mention he had initially been planning on trying to give it all to Craig and the facility reward was an afterthought.

ZeMadDoctor: How do we decide who to gift the experience to? There's three of us and both times you mentioned your own monsters to ascend. I don’t want to pick this if its going to cause arguments.

Innearth: We could take turns? Once to each of us after catching three whales?

Abe: Okay no. I understand your point but…what if different whales give different amounts of experience? That seems uneven. What if we don’t actually have a specific monster we want to gift a massive chunk of experience to? No B is much fairer and…hey Doc you mentioned A giving us the most benefit right?

ZeMadDoctor: Yep. We did the work we get the reward. We don’t nessisarily need the reward... but it’s a nice bonus for our time and seemed the simplest of the options.

Abe: Okay, here's why B is better from a purely profit-centric focus okay? So if we chose A we get 40k experience split 3 ways. That's 13,333 experience each and that’s all well and good but 120,000 experience is lost!

Abe: B on the other hand we split…53,333 experience between all our monsters. Here's how that’s smarter math time with prof Abe.

Abe: Some monsters might ascend from all this experience that’s true… but all the ones that die instead of ascending will give us the experience! We laundered that 160k experience through our monsters much more effectively than the system with its stupid 25% efficiency! That is all. I will take questions now :3

ZeMadDoctor: …I didn’t think of that. So essentially we could make a couple thousand monsters. Gift them the experience. Kill them all and recoup our costs?

Abe: wew. If you want to do it that way we could... I was just meaning gaining that experience in the day to day life of your dungeon man. Like adventurers would kill them you don’t have to farm them that badly. Besides. Don’t you want some of them to ascend? Don’t you care about your ascended monsters?

ZeMadDoctor: …alright I’m switching my vote from A to B.

Innearth: so I’m outnumbered? That feels cheap…I guess I feel like…I feel like you two are being shortsighted looking at the personal gains when there's something here we can’t do otherwise.

Innearth: Like I can see the benefit of choosing B but C just seems like it is so much more versatile. Like imagine! We could try and gift the experience to Yggdrasil! Isn’t that why we are killing whales in the first place?

Abe: …bro we outnumber you but I don’t want you to hate the decision. Maybe if you better explain what option C is solving? What can we do to convince you B is the best option?

Innearth: It just… helps solve a problem I didn’t know how to solve. I’ve been looking into making a god and its incredibly hard right? Like…its just a massive grind.

Abe: But why do you want to make a god? I’m not discouraging you that sounds cool ...Its just the first I’ve heard of this and it seems big.

ZeMadDoctor: Does he need a reason?

Innearth: It's kind of just a goal. It doesn’t have to be making a god okay? Its just the goal of many that excited me the most. Having this goal is better than not having any goal and having something to work towards motivates me. Honestly I'm not explaining it well. The goal itself isn't that important the idea of having a goal is? Not feeling like I'm aimless?

Abe: Fair. Counterpoint: If you picked this goal just to have it…do you really want the solution handed to you? Feels like a goal for goals sake is better off being there in the background. Like what happens when you solve this goal? You don’t have anything to do anymore?

Innearth: I feel like if I’m trying my best to solve a goal I should latch onto every idea to help me make it. Ignoring anything that helps is dumb. Besides. If I solve this problem I just have to find a new one! If I make a god all I have to do is pick a new goal! That’s the beauty of it.

Innearth: Anyways. I just got excited by the idea of a solution. I won’t be devastated if we don’t pick it.

ZeMadDoctor: So we are decided on B?

Innearth: Yep.

After every dungeon picked B the panel faded.

A moment later a replacement panel appeared.

Party split. Three faction heads distributing 160k experience evenly.

Faction head ‘Innearth’ Recives 53,333xp for his faction.

Distributing using “Strongest bias” method – removing vaguely linked and non combat potential faction members.

23 crystal worms.

34 metal worms.

3 water slimes.

8093 Lesser snakes

61 deprivation slimes

168 crazy balls.

1 crazy key.

20 Stone Burrowers.

3 distraction parrots.

5 minecart mothers

890 magma spiders.

890 crystal bats.

20 trapdoor spiders.

35 undead.

486 void flies,

4 dust controllers.

1 nullstone golem.

1185 crystal turtles,

1221 crystal hedgehogs

2367 greater crystal snakes.

5500 Crystal Dwarves

4 steam horses

50 snow wolves.

723 ‘whimsy’ monsters.

40 sand beds.

20 sand wurms.

2 dust mana devils.

1000 snowmen.

1005 lazer spiders.

333 crystal golems.

1 slaughter stalker.

1472 arch crystal snakes.

3 injection wheels

1 crystal ‘dragon’

53 cannibal snowmen.

1 hydra.

7311 Super Soliders.

1 roach knight.

1 ‘CISC’ controller.

Summary:

Total members 33067.

Every member recived one 'experience point'.

Top 20266 members receive a second 'experience point'.

Even as the visual summary of their choice appeared in front of each of them, Innearth saw shifts happen across his dungeon.

Despite being only “one experience point” for quite a bit of his dungeon… for several monsters that was enough. They were at 4/5 or 9/10 or 99/100 or whatever their invisible pre proper measurable system counter was... and this tipped them over.

A dozen snakes, five dwarves. Two worms which quickly grew to nearly three times their size. That would have been it if not for a very specific change.

This ascension was one of the strangest Innearth had ever watched. It was drawn out over such a long period of time with such a large amount of subtle magics flying about his dungeon that the result looked like the whole environment was briefly backlit by a magical aurora borealis.

The living crystal ascended.

Not “A living crystal” but the hive of thousands and thousands of crystals spread throughout nearly every floor in his dungeon.

They had all grown from a few distinct initial seeds creating three separate sized “plant types”, each which had somehow mixed and created new strains.

A patch of crystal spikes replanted again and again for years of real time…a massive number of crystal bats with symbiotic living crystal ranged weapons. A lesser but still large number of hedgehogs with living crystal quills or turtles with living crystal cannons. Plenty of random patches both purposefully planted and accidentally grown based on their hosts bringing them to new locations.

Some of the strongest adventurers looked spooked or curious as they sensed or saw the magical lightshow – one teleported themselves and every other sapient out of a floor in one massive panicked escape…and then it was done.

Everything was different…felt different. But nothing had visibly changed. Living crystals grew like normal on the walls and continued to fire from confused bats or turtles.

It was only when Innearth stared deeper at the plant that he noticed anything amiss.

A faint whirlpool of life-related mana spun at the center of each individual core…it wasn’t that impressive individually just a faint spiral of energy…but it was identical in every single living crystal. Eerily so – a hundred thousand spirals perfectly in sync.

As more time passed more changes became known. Despite being somewhat static and uniform in size beforehand…these new living crystals were growing at different speeds. Some patches previously locked into a certain size were expanding – others instead of staying a widespread patch began focusing inwards overlapping crystals and creating solid “cages” of living crystal with swirling mana forming into more and more complex geometric shapes.

A negative of this new event was his system no longer let him place living crystal shards into it as a material…that almost killed his monster supply as a solid number of his common weaker enemies used it.

…Trying to make a new non ascended living crystal kept failing. Every time he had created new seeds had been by luck and now Innearth couldn’t tell if it was failing because they already existed or if his control was too good to purposefully “fail” into a seed.

A final point of this event happened days later when sapients began analyzing and classifying the new monster in his dungeon.

Crystal Treant:

NOTE: UNKNOWN AND NEW VARIABLE IN ESTABLISHED FLOORS.

Please read one of the warnings placed everywhere about the new change. You can’t miss them.

This section dedicated to any information anyone discovers about the new plant? Monster? And will remain easily editable for this initial period.

Freaky structures being built. I set up a monitoring device and left. Some crystal bats have started hitting harder. Anyone listening to the recall notice? Personally I’m going to keep my booze... whats the worse that can happen it kills me? Bah. [Dimond dungeon wiki user] Please only leave information about the new dungeon monster and refrain from using this as a chat fourm.

…so this is a monster now?

Innearth checked various sites for information on treants finding they were a standard but rare ascension from plantlife. There was only detailed information on large single monster tenants most of whom could be summed up as “walking tree”. The closest he could find to his current scenario were some parasitic and certain hive monster ascensions…maybe if he combined some information about them with some about treants and their modified monster system.

Apparently treants counted as monsters and had monster-styled evolutions…but could also passively gain experience and had certain unique evolution “trees”.

Heh, evolution trees for the trees.

Well. I’m excited to see how it progresses. I wonder why the treant hasn’t reached out yet if it’s a proper ascended? What does it see? Also, parasitic and symbiotic monsters can gain experience from their host…is that why no crystal bats have ascended yet? Before it gets out of hand I should figure out an alternative for the ranged fighters…I have to tweak the bat schematic to use something else now that living crystal spikes are off limits…probably a skill-based solution right? That seems promising.

Innearth was tentatively happy with the decision. He had pushed hard for Option C but…beside the ascensions, the experience gained in the past few days from simple monster destruction and recreation was significant enough to be noticeable. A whole level noticeable... but Innearth wasn't positive which parts were due to the choice and which part was due to all his other sources – and there were still plenty that hadn't died.

He had helped his two whaling friends create a second harpoon and a portion of his attention was currently focused on both helping them catch a second and better store the previous corpse while making room for a new one...

The majority of his attention began shifting and refocusing on his mana practice. A dedicated part had been chugging away at shrinking mana practice this whole time – and now that he had more mental power focused on it the dividends finally began paying out.

It seemed like the way that helped Innearth get it working was by mentally twisting the part of void mana dedicated to “deleting stuff” into deleting the vacuum surrounding it. Deleting “null” essentially. A proper shrinking mana expert would have cleanly removed it but for now, this rendered the damaging portion of void inert and let him smooth out a lot of the shrinking portion.

His practice moved to shrinking soft and delicate shapes – shrinking cups of water without shattering or spilling them and creating a room of shrinking mana material that helped shrinking magic inside of it.

He tested out shrinking cosmic void but found it didn’t play nearly as nice as he had hoped. He could shrink the space around it but the material stubbornly resisted despite his best efforts. If he pushed it as hard as he could – attempting to tunnel into whatever pocket dimension cosmic void actually was – he would shatter the material.

Innearth: Okay, Shrinking mana get! I can shrink our design by about 16 times using my dedicated shrinking room. I also got an egg we can shove it in afterwards!

Fated Eternal Design: Ah! Come see what we’ve designed. Do you have anything to add to it? We’ll have to scale the design up if we can shrink it by that much, but, a plus side is now we get more details. The details matter!

Innearth fumbled around finding the schematic his friends were working on.

Yggdrasil was a squat miniature tree with incredibly dark brown and vibrant-looking wood. Even as he watched the group was scaling the design up and filling in the new sections.

Throughout the entire inside of the tree ran thick veins of ambrosia sap. Less plant-like and more like an animal's nervous system, sap ran in a long loop through a series of a dozen manipulating…turbines? Hearts? They all contained a ring of river mana bound to life mana made by Amy which sucked liquid through at a steady rate.

Beside the thick veins, small capillary equivalents ran out through the flesh of the wood – and the wood was actually flesh. Instead of a solid block of Yggdrasil heartwood, the spiderweb of ambrosia capillaries moved through different shaped “cells”. Blocky brick-like shapes of wood filled with identical mixes of different pure elements and soupy liquids...Innearth couldn't tell if they were intelligently designed or just a random mix like he had done previously. Like pure carbon? Are they making a diamond? Calcium oxide mud mana materials? Those seem strangely specific?

At the very top of the tree, a bunch of fake-looking miniature leaf buds were placed and at the bottom roots with jagged-looking spikes dangled.

The whole schematic was very much a work in progress and Innearth couldn’t initially understand a lot of the decisions being made.

Innearth: Okay, so I can't seem to shrink cosmic void. I'm sorry if you wanted it for the bark.

Brutality Queen: …alright. That’s okay we were prepared for this. Plan B is to layer the bark with different defences. I’ve been thinking about this tree’s final form a lot lately…and come to some conclusions I figured I’d share.

Amy: What have you been thinking of? We’re here to listen!

Brutality Queen: So. I’ve been trying to estimate how big it will grow…based on how fast it grew undesigned and…don’t laugh but based on a sort of feeling I’m getting from my affinity I know it's going to be big.

Brutality Queen: Like at least 10-20km tall big but likely much much much higher? That’s going to be really heavy which is why we’ve put some materials to lighten it near the top – to prevent it from falling over – but also…the roots are designed to dig down far and I’ve started to worry they are going to dig down too far you know?

Brutality Queen: We need to be prepared for them digging into the mantle we obviously want its bark to be strong and while Yggdrasil heartwood is relatively non-flammable I’d still call it weak to fire. Mantle will burn it right up. This whole tree is…it's almost like it's impossible. It's like it's designed to fail.

Amy: Well that’s why we are actually designing it to succeed!

Innearth: So bark similar to the facility walls? I can add the unlife and undeath materials for at least two of the bark layers…could see about using ice mana around its roots to protect against the mantel. Could probably add solid void as a bark layer too - it's no cosmic void but it protects against void so that’s something?.

Innearth: Could honestly put a thin layer of ice in its entire bark instead of just its roots that should protect it from any fire.

Abe: Standard kit of stuff got it. I’ll add explosion and lightning resistant materials. Doc can protect against kinetic damage. FYI second whale should be coming in soon if anyone wants to watch!

The group rushed over to the newest whaling site. This time a stream of ascended from queen swam out in a swarm and helped pull the 20km void whale through safely.

It counted Queen as "helping" with that move – giving her a share but not Amy or FED... despite both of them existing in the same general area…and gave them 120kexp to split between the four participants.

This wave of experience ascended another dozen or so monsters in Innearth's dungeon – this time a single bat/spider pair ascended together becoming his first of those pairs to ascend.

…Innearth was beginning to have difficulty giving all his ascended monsters enough attention. He let them do what they wanted while making a note to figure out a better solution.

He didn’t see them as disposable but they started to blend together and when one of them attacked and was killed by an adventurer…he found it hard to muster up any real feelings for them. They had been ascended for too short of a time…all that ended up happening was Innearth felt bad about not feeling bad.

Innearth couldn’t tell if the crystal treant was receiving any of this experience but he did notice the crystal structures were beginning to change – their mana patterns becoming more and more complicated. Right as Innearth was staring at a certain particularly knotted-looking one, a series of twists seemed to happen – like the streams of mana were a ball of string being pulled into a knot. The magical change was shortly followed by a series of slight cracks – like handfuls of small rocks being tossed at a window – and a collapse of several interlocking crystals.

In the center of the structure, crystals broke away depositing a small…golem for lack of better words onto the ground. It looked like someone crossed a blue toaster with a spider and gave it a humanoid head and torso as an afterthought.

This birthed monster shook shards of crystal off of itself and stared around curiously before stumbling away like a newborn fawn. A bolt of sizzling grey light flashed from the side of the room as a black-robed adventurer entered the room and fired at the first thing that moved.

…anti-climatic.

Innearth watched the adventurer wander over and poke the corpse lightly even as a second and third treant spawn was birthed into existence at two separate locations.

The spawner seemed to shudder lightly as it started up again mana beginning to spool out and twist about…The adventurer smashed his foot down onto the crystal structure a gray spark accompanying his stomp and shattering some inner working.

A bag was produced and this adventurer happily looted both the shards of the spawner and corpse but Innearth had already moved on.

All about his dungeon Innearth saw little toaster fawns awkwardly, and then steadily more gracefully, begin to explore. They seemed to learn as a group – several dying by triggering traps or falling off things near the start…and then each subsequent generation learned not to walk off cliffs or stand on steam vents.

Innearth kept a solid portion of his attention just watching the dumb creatures learn how to survive, while returning to focus on the Yggdrasil schematic.

Okay…what really can I add at this point? It feels done? I can’t use cosmic void as a bark but…what about putting a single grain of it at the end of each root? That…feels like it would be a good idea. Help it dig down. Single grain wouldn’t care about how big the tree grows…Great anchor holding it down, Great way to cut through the ground. Yeah making this change…

Oh! What if I make a tiny cosmic void ball in the center of the tree and fill it with so much mana it becomes like a protected core? What if I give the tree a bunch of cores? A whole circuit!

Innearths circuit builder senses were tingling and he really wanted to twist and line some of the ambrosia veins…

Innearth: Hey guys…can I add cores to the tree? Is it weird giving the tree cores? Feels like something I can add. Cores make everything better right?

Brutality Queen: Not to…discourage you but yeah it's kind of weird. I think it might make it weaker to be honest the goal is to have the entire flesh be the host for Yggdrasil's soul, not hold it in a single core or circuit. If you add a circuit just for the sake of it, those will end up being weak points.

Innearth: Okay…new plan. What about getting my dwarves to draw runes on the heartwood before we add the bark?

Brutality Queen: I…have no opinon on that one. Anyone else?

Fated Eternal Design: That sounds amazing. Runes should cover every visible portion of the tree. It should tell a whole story and speak of some grand mystic plan. They will look absolutely amazing do it!

Amy: I think he was mentioning under the bark? They wont be visible?

Fated Eternal Design: Would they not show up under a proper mana sight? I didn’t realize we were layering nullstone into it. It's much more mysterious if the tree looks normal but has runes in a mana aided vision of it.

Innearth: I think the important thing to ask…the real question is what do you want the runes to do? My dwarves can do pretty much whatever you want but the more specific a request the less effective they might be…

Brutality Queen: Our schematic goals are to make sure it efficiently uses its nutrients. Grows upwards healthy and doesn’t kill itself by falling over or burning after digging too deep. Side goals are to give it better defences so…just any runes that help those things?

Innearth: Hey Abe. You should see if Oynx and Rutile want to come over and help. I already asked Steeve and Ilm to come on over to Queen's dungeon we are getting ready to start printing pieces for them to draw on.

Abe: Sure. Btw we are planning a third whale come help with the newest harpoon.

Innearth: …why not.