Jake rode the waves.

A solid-water board rooted his feet firmly down, while a forest of kraken arms loomed about above his head – their rubbery razor-tipped tentacles swaying in the light wind.

Both of Jake's arms were jerked upwards accompanied by a sharp shout and hundreds of large globules of sea burst up to float about in the air.

Beside him, his [companion] surfaced and trilled – a large guppy turned monster he had raised from birth. Some of the more scattered globs combined with the sound – all the globs becoming slightly less misshapen.

Pausing to reach down with one hand and pet his fish – very important distraction – Jake stood up once more and began to sing.

He listened to the song of the mana – hearing mana in the waves and wind and sky like his elven mother had taught him long ago. A resonating hum of life surrounding the discordant buzz of the sea his mana quickly covered all the globs at the speed of sound.

Jake listened to mana’s song, a conductor’s hand teasing out discordant tones in chunks of sea – teasing out what each droplet wanted to be...could be with his help. He listened to tones that didn’t match their surroundings and convinced them to move – jumping to a different band that would appreciate their tone more. Jake sorted the environmental mana – changing a hundred messy and broken blobs into more useful forms. He performed a feat of magic most deemed impossible in a few moments.

Humming and feeling the joy of mana rush up his throat Jake coaxed the primed sea chunks to change…to become his – he infused his voice with mana and the whole area vibrated with his summon-sound.

Strength in water.

Strength in family.

Strength in not attacking directly like his merman father had taught him.

Well now Jake “made” his own family. His [companion] and [summons] were all he needed.

Somewhere between notes in his song a wizened trident made completely of crystalized salt had formed in his hand and around him, sea spirits fell – chunks of “sea” gaining form and solidifying into a literal army of [summons]. Summons dependant upon their sorted environmental mana and each as strong as level 100 human.

Kraken arms rushed forwards and were cut down as his army built – his song having started a magical reaction at this point that continued to suck in salt water and output salt summons.

Wind whistled in his gills and flung his seashell-lined hair back and forth as Jake sung and violence erupted about him. A small spot of calm surrounded by a maelstrom of tentacles and claws and jagged teeth and crystalized weapons.

Abruptly laughing, Jake's song rose into a crescendo and caused mana-drenched sea to lift him and his pet up high above the battle. A thin podium of water – a spout of ocean crystallized into solidity with salt and song in a way very different from ice – hung above the fray like a throne. Below the sea turned red with monster blood and Jake crouched down slowly dangling his legs over the edge as he got comfortable.

This part of the battle always bored Jake – it caused him to get closer and closer initially hence only starting his song once he was surrounded. He needed some slight thrill to still find joy in this – something many of his contacts in the adventurer’s guild would be horrified to find out.

For Jake was the level 398 [sea adventurer]. The only one he knew – everyone else seemed so scared of water monsters. They always stuck to the coast talking of the horrors of an open ocean in hushed tones and stories designed to scare children.

He was different. His twisted bloodline made him almost like a necromancer on open water – a one-man army specifically built to kill sea creatures.

He wasn’t afraid of the ocean. The open ocean was his home and he had even crossed continents multiple times over the past few centuries – a feat only spoken of in legend.

Deep below his feet, a school of sword mana fish was dashed to bits in the teeth of a salt shark. To the side a depth cursed [Abyssal Angler] swung severing deep-sea rods of void water towards his feet –rods were blocked by the shield of a salt guardian a moment later but it was still novel enough to warrant mentioning.

“What is an abyssal even doing this close to the surface” Jake laughed humming and beginning to toss bolts of sea downwards – each saltwater projectile erasing a monster from the battle.

On his chest, a twisted seashell on a thick rope of kelp began to buzz an incessant whine of some ship being attacked or coast being raided or…other annoyance.

Sighing Jake hummed a new note – a pitch shift of mana that enhanced his necklaces sound to something more audible – and his fear was confirmed. An endless list of quests only he could complete. Each with maximum importance each that needed to be solved right away!

“…I need a vacation” Jake muttered. Today was definitely a Tuesday.

A minor slaughter of sea monsters by a rare melfman as documented 2020AS

It's the end of an era.

By that sad note, Innearth was referring to the facility finally being cleared – a new adventuring group led by a suspiciously charming looking adventurer and two fast-moving support mage/assassin/scout hybrids had beaten the section for the first time. Had “overkilled” it if Innearth was being honest – making sure to smash every bonus section despite the time sink.

They had beaten CISC’s fake core, gained the rewards hidden within and then moved to Queen’s dungeon. Presumably, after this point they found a place to stay or decided to permanently move to her burgeoning city, centered around the tree of life.

According to Queen, this “charming adventurer” was actually an arch-goblin…but that was the excuse Innearth needed to continue building.

This delve happened nearly directly after his minor dragon incursion and subsequent explanation of what had happened to his friends – it felt like everything was happening so quickly these days.

I guess that’s a sign of getting older.

Of his friends the two sides of the spectrum could be summed up as follows: Queen had thought they had a new pet, Doc had acted wary mentioning they shouldn’t provoke the dragon. Abe and Innearth fell closer to Doc’s side while Amy and FED were closer to Queen. Abe seemed to think they should show the dragon their harpoon setup for goodwill, while Doc told them all to wait and see…he seemed to have a bit of a trauma with creatures drastically stronger than him.

...Innearth privately asked Doc if he wanted help making his own box and got back a tentative yes. He offered all his friends but the benefits didn’t seem to outweigh the work and increased cost of blocking themselves off at their core…so Doc was the only one armoured up.

..

To begin his setup on the new floor, Innearth started asking his friends for help. He stated he wanted to make an incredibly hard floor…and after some deliberation once again sent the link to the “meaning of life site.

Innearth: Just if you want to know why.

Brutality Queen: Nah, I don’t need a reason. I’m 110% on board! You had me at “strong floor” what sort of strong are we talking about?

Innearth: Okay, here’s what I’m thinking…

Cement was a miracle material. A magical creation that could do exactly what Innearth wanted and was easy enough to convince Queen to help him make.

Between the two of them – and several failed cow and plant prototypes – they created a mixture.

A field of solid void plants grew – rich soil and growth beacons designed to continue growing the grasses and bushes at a steady speed. Cows wandered about grazing on the materials turning them into a gravely sandy paste in their gullet and dumping them into a wet magical “cement” in their second stomach. This material was mixed and…for lack of a better word “dumped” out into a conveyor belt at the edge of the field.

Moving away and being squished into a slab the cement passed through a dry/dust mana “setting” station before being fed into the void tempering presses to finish them off.

After being tempered to an insane relative strength, the slab chugged out into empty void – there were currently four of these machines extruding endless slabs and Innearth was planning on increasing production soon.

Now, these slabs weren’t quite as “indestructible” as the solid non-cement materials would be but they were completely automated and good enough for the “support” beams of this new floor.

Roughly a single meter across and 10 meters away from each other side to side these beams currently…showed the bones of a floor 34m long. That wasn’t very exciting – Innearth wanted at least a kilometer wide to start so they needed another 87 machines and a much larger setup.

There should probably also be a slight wall on the sides of this floor so another couple machines…but each of these presses thinned the void atmosphere they were using to temper the slabs and required more vents. Those vents needed to be placed relatively far away from each other and needed to be made out of cosmic void to prevent too much leaking…and if Innearth was honest just copy-pasting the setup and expanding every feed would require months if not years to finish. Plenty of time to start designing and finishing the rest of the planning.

At some point, they realized they needed time based materials to help hide the beams and floor from an “excessive” amount of demons. Adding Abe to the mix they created entropy plants in the grazing field to mix together in the cement which had a wonderful side effect of speeding up the growth of the field and speed of cows running about.

Next they worked on filling the spaces between each of these solid beams. A second type of monster was created – this one shaped closer to ants with three large spherical chambers linked back to back and giving a pair of legs. Six total legs, a good reasonable number for a monster.

They had a different methodology to their material generation than the cows…instead of combining multiple steps these monsters created all their webbing “in monster” despite that being less efficient.

To start off the first chamber, symbiotic crystal treant limbs were placed growing inwards towards a whirling smashing “chipper”. The nearly constant stream of crystal shards was fed downwards into the second chamber – this one filled with corrupted void crystals that consumed the shards and mana and spit out third-generation corrupted void crystals. Those corrupted void crystals were fed into the last and most skill-oriented chamber.

By that Innearth meant it only functioned due to copious skill organs fixing all of his desires.

Glands of trace elements magicked into making sense and an acid bath helped convert corrupted crystals into “goop”. Goop was then manipulated and deposited out into quick-setting thin void-based wires. These ants ran back and forth jumping between “tempered void/time cement beams” laying their razor-thin web into a slightly tempered and strong void net.

A third and final monster was created – this one based on the original expanding silver flesh.

Its innards were a madness-soaked reactor that pumped out dangerous endlessly expanding materials at a rushing, bucking, "attempting to slip-free" rate. A drip-feed of regenerating metal flesh with an insane 100:1 material ratio once converted.

If this reactor was plugged for even a second that separate plant-like inner section would break free – ripping the outer monster apart and attempting to cover everything…Innearth moved his roach knight to the area on protection detail. They weren’t doing much in their hidden hallway after all and protecting the cattle was a more important job.

The silver flesh-producing monster was shaped like a massive silver slug and other than the silver madness organ the entire rest of the 15m long slug's body was filled with circuits designed with a single goal. Turning the silver output “safe”. Rendering it inert.

Honestly, Innearth wasn’t fully sure how efficient this monster was and a good part of its design had been based around seeing if he could do it. A self-challenge he completed. Either way above the beams and resting on the net a solid layer of nearly pure silver was laid.

Back and forth the slugs moved, leaving trails of silver behind them that built ever higher in several meandering layers.

This is where Amy came into play. She noticed what they were doing – hard to ignore with it happening right beside the facility – and claimed they couldn’t have a whole floor of flatish solid silver with no real variation.

After leaving them with that for a bit, she came back with tons of metallic grasses and simple plants that could grow, thrive and spread in metal. Crop dusters randomly dropped metallic bushes or flowers, while planted patches of copper, silver and gold grasses slowly spread across their finished areas.

A metallic plane stretching ever further out into the unknown. Custom plants shaped like cacti or weird bushes. Random signs in unknown languages and the occasional crumbling shack or ruin once Fed added his touch.

Of course, the floor only extended out a hundred meters or so at its furthest end but giving it a few more years and hopefully the “several kilometer” goal will make it look bigger.

Doc came into play at this point in time. He looked at what they had and immediately pointed out the “obvious” things they were missing.

ZeMadDoctor: #1. Atmosphere. Sapients cant swim in the void very well. Staring off into it will probably drive them mad and even if this is designed for transcendents they still need to breathe every once in a while.

ZeMadDoctor: #2. Gravity. You don’t want them floating off into the void even if they can swim back. Other than that minor (massive) problem. Love the setup. Wonder how big we can make it!

Innearth…didn’t even know how those facts had been forgotten. Sadly it seemed harder to automate than what they had done so far. Not impossible! But annoying.

Innearth decided to cheat the gravity problem. Obviously embedding gravity plates across the entire floor would be optimal…but he would have to do that himself and it felt like that would invalidate all his work so far.

No what Innearth ended up doing was creating a crystal dwarf at each beam. He gave them some gravity plants for materials and told them to write gravity runes into the cement between when it was set and when it was baked.

As long as Innearth and his friends didn’t have to do the work it was “automated” after all and his dungeon monsters were pretty useful cogs in the machine that he was creating.

Currently, the edge of the floor seemed to slowly lose gravity and form before falling into space…that was a final “end of the world” sort of effect so they left the edge as is.

A harder to deal with goal was the atmosphere. This part wasn’t quite as simple of a fix. The void atmosphere was not a vacuum and could be safely moved about in – despite containing no matter to breathe in and out…assuming transcendents could hold their breath for a reasonable amount of time and with plans to make breathing artifacts for sapients who couldn’t figure it out themselves the group planted a few “Air ferns” each which slowly filled a small sphere around them with breathable oxygen and atmosphere. They then set to work trying to cover the sky.

Fed figured out a wide range base – creating mist releasing and controlling dungeon plants that blanketed the sky and helped make the floor feel contained and less…open.

As Doc had mentioned the real problem was the void itself. The way the atmosphere twisted space fractalling dimensions and breaking weaker minds who stared into it.

The dimensions…the multiple dimensions were harder for adventurers to process than dungeons. The lower a distance to look, the better.

This misty swirling sky also helped the dungeons feel more comfortable expanding with the floor. Staring out into the endless expanse of the void atmosphere while disconcerting…was different enough it didn’t trigger their “wide open spaces” phobia but it was still anxiety-inducing. The misty blanket was calming even if it offered very little protection from demons.

For demons had started showing up already – Humanoid creatures with cruel intelligence wandered about searching for things to torture or kill. Eel-like feathered monstrosities ripped into the metal grass, visibly growing larger with how fast they were attacking the foliage.

The roach knight started dual-wielding protection duty and cleanup detail – galloping back and forth slaughtering demons happily – while the hydra was moved from its mostly useless position guarding Innearths portals to help thin the herds.

…Innearth wanted to start making some roach knights and would soon but they were incredibly expensive for their equivalent strength and he was a much more experienced core by this point. He could make them stronger and a portion of his attention shifted to fixing the base schematic.

One minor note was that while the floor itself was automated they still needed to manually expand into it and the void atmosphere didn’t make a good expansion pathway. It was doable... but each dungeon still had to embed dungeon circuits in the floor to gain any real distance.

…

As a break from this “floor’s” design, While Innearth had been spearheading the automated metal plane’s creation…the rest of his friends were focused on a different sort of goal. A less important one all things said and done, but one with much quicker results and a more “fun” design process.

They were creating a reward floor on the opposite end of the spectrum from his pure lake.

A truly massive bar was the center of this effort. Wrapping around the tree of life beside the facility and bordering the silver expanse this floor was centered on Abe’s new alcohol creation effects. Abe’s attention…along with 24 something odd ascended crystal dwarves.

All the dwarves were both taste testers and engineers – focused with more attention than they had shown any other project in their entire life. Alcohol mana made cheap alcoholic materials relatively easy – with Abe’s material creation spell and alcohol mana there were dozens of straight alcohols that were…fine but lacked a certain oomph. Good to get blackout drunk on but that was it. No, the good alcohols needed more work that ascended dwarves were willing to do the leg work for.

For the most part, the best magical alcohols were created in multi-step processes. Some alcohol materials were solid and made containers and different shaped devices to aid in this process.

Alcohol mana barrels with every square inch covered in runes less than a cm wide were a good cornerstone of this process. Different liquids, plants and assorted “materials” were pumped into the barrels and left to sit in entropy mana cellars.

Yep, Abe had made aging rooms where barrels could be rolled in and out – leaving the juices for days to age and increase their flavour or give time for the transmutation functions to work properly.

These barrels were not the only method they were using to create alcohol however. Their experiments sought greater and greater heights. Higher and higher quality booze at the cost of everything else.

One tank for example was filled with live non-magical fish swimming about in transmuting booze – supposedly to improve its flavour. They couldn’t survive naturally – in fact, they were constantly gulping unable to breathe the booze – and had to be constantly healed while suffocating endlessly…Innearth didn’t care for this tank. Torture was gross even if it was “only fish”.

Another series of boxy containers were dedicated to throwing dungeon monster corpses or specific monster parts – sometimes leaving the claws or eyeballs in the served drinks “just because”.

Obviously, some of these experiments were quite obviously dangerous – in fact, one dwarf had already died…but to be fair the drink that did him in had melted every cup they had tried to contain it in and had been lapped sizzling off the melting floor…Innearth took that moment to convince Amy to set up ambrosia healing stations for life support inadvertently adding a new drug to the mix.

Besides monsters, a few plants were found to grow inside or were watered by alcohol creating solid alcoholic fruits and vegetables like alcoholic tubers. They could be turned into fancy garnishes or used near the start of other processes feeding into the beginning of assembly lines…

Most of the alcohols being made were actually transmuted water with additives. Some however – mainly the most exotic variations – were created with monster blood or less identifiable fluids. Blood wine for example was one of the hardest individual materials to make taste good – requiring nearly 100 separate distillery steps before it was finished…but the dwarves who drank it claimed it was worth it.

There was just so much alcohol Innearth privately thought it was overwhelming every other trait this floor currently had. Besides the literally thousands of different flavours and “types” of magical boozes, the rest of Innearth’s friends had designed rooms with which to drink in. Everything from homely wood-panneled rooms with comfy chairs staffed by NPC masks…to fantastical floating beer boats on rivers of cheap booze surrounded by alcoholic trees and staffed by tentacled monstrosities.

There was even a cage fighting ring where monsters could fight and be bet on – or adventurers could try their luck entering the fray to earn prizes while providing their companions free entertainment.

That last room had Innearth thinking. He wanted to help, he wanted to feel included.

Testing out some designs in his own dungeon first – to make sure they looked okay, he didn’t want to prototype something dumb where his friends were watching – he figured out a few themes he liked and started building parts for them.

A couple different brands of dance floor were spread throughout – with strobing lights and Laser mana disco balls filtering non-dangerous light through different coloured crystals.

He finally figured out how to make some sound deletion materials to create “quiet rooms” as a counter to the dance floors…but was finding it hard to make music. Dungeons were…pretty much tone deaf and Sound mana while relatively “easy” and common in adventurers…was nearly impossible for dungeons to figure out.

He ended up creating the silent versions of the dance rooms while making a note to try and create singing monsters hoping a good solid circuit could make the leap he could not.

Some of the dance floors had secrets or games with the tiles below needing to be pressed in different patterns but they still felt “undone” despite Innearth's craze of making toys and items for them – stuff like disco hats or glowsticks and funny-looking dance shoes.

The last set of rooms Innearth worked on were the “game rooms”.

Taking some inspiration from the cage fight and betting pool Innearth designed [SYSTEM_LUCK] randomly spinning gambling rooms along with challenges and puzzles designed for adventurers to test each other in.

Honestly, most of the rooms were just to break up all the booze… but sometimes he couldn’t help himself and leaned hard into the alcohol aspect. One room for example was set up as a drinking “contest” with a random reward for those able to stay conscious while doing shots with a very happy-looking dwarf.

…

At some point in this design adventurers started leaking in despite “the floor not being done”.

The disguised arch-goblin and his friends came across a particularly drunk dwarf who stated “I live here now” and decided to claim an empty room for themselves.

A pair of musically inclined elven adventurers began singing a haunting song in the disco rooms – not one that you could dance to – and a strange fishy adventurer Innearth first pegged as a kobold (and then found out was a melfman) showed up and began ordering mug after mug of the fish tank whiskey.

Even Tom showed up at some point! He snuck about the place nearly invisible to all but the dungeon's influence as if worried someone he knew would see him.

…

After a certain point of adventurers having a run of the place, the dungeons just gave up and called it finished. Slowly but surely the floor became populated until there was always at least one adventure in it. Many found rooms and began “renting them” – on that note many of the adventurers seemed to want to pay for stuff. They kept leaving magical chips of currency everywhere or shoving them into the ghostly hands of confused dungeon monster waiters.

Innearth found none of the other dungeons seemed to care about it so he started collecting the money and using it in the gambling halls.

There was really quite a lot of new events that happened because of this floor. Innearth saw a vampire for the first time – a dark and brooding death mana-soaked red-eyed adventurer who found the blood wine and loved it.

More than that however Innearth started getting to semi-rare (for him) species of adventurers in his own dungeon.

The first was droves of dwarves of all ages – come seeking the “holy land”. As a group the dungeons still wanted to keep this reward floor in a high-level area – it was a reward to reach it after all, they didn’t want to just put it near the start of their dungeons…that didn’t mean Innearth didn’t cheer the dwarves on – watching them create incredibly strong and increasingly unstable self-made artifacts. It was just so much fun watching them delve deeper and deeper with the sole goal of reaching this floor he even looked away when massive groups pushed through – disabling some events designed to prevent 30 “adventurers” at once from rushing a boss.

The second species was the elves. The continent Innearth was on – Murek – had plenty of elven cities, nomadic tribes, and in fact races – each with their own cultures and societies. They had never once reached out or come close to Innearth’s dungeon up till now…but as word of Yggdrasil spread that fact changed.

These elves came on their own pilgrimage to the “holy land” – somewhat amusingly mistaking their destination as the same as the dwarves when they met – but mainly with the goal of reaching Queen’s dungeon.

They all wanted to live in the shadow of the world tree still growing slowly but steadily upwards.

Some stopped in Innearth’s dungeon – just as soon as they found the crystal treant’s spawn. Word spread and soon every passing elf needed to make sure to find a crystal spawn to “pay respects to”. This usually involved wandering about for hours at a time sometimes just to bow to a crystalline center and continue on.

…

Time passed and Innearth finished his Roach knight optimization. The two largest changes were the introduction of shrinking mana instead of void mana trashing the insides and a set of cosmic void armour afterwards but Innearth made small changes throughout the entire design.

Printing them out signalled a start to “phase two” of the new floor's design and Innearth delved right back into it.