Q: Tom! Tom may I have a moment? When are you going to review the crossroads again! Theres a party floor now! The tree of life! Do you have a moment?

A: I'm sorry, I've already reviewed the facility phenomena. I have no interest in revisiting it any time soon. Please don't visit my home. How did you find this place? I need to increase security...

Excerpt obtained from an "interview" conducted with famous dungeon reviewer "Tom" dated 2010AS.

Innearth…Innearth knew what he was working towards but partway through started to falter. He felt like…he felt like if he had thought of this plan another Core would have as well, and even if Innearth had some unique points…what was the chance that his attempt would work?

Essentially as a base, Innearth wanted a floor adventurers could fight void creatures on – they seemed to have more experience on average and cost him nothing to make.

The goal he kept close to his heart – the goal he hadn’t yet told his friends – was he wanted to scale the upper end of this floor to the upper end of the demons he had seen. He wanted adventurers fighting void whales.

A good part of the specifics of that was getting fuzzier and fuzzier the more time he worked on the floor however.

He wanted to increase the survivability of adventurers – figuring out how to save them from anything that would kill them – because dying would wipe the slate. If the adventurers pushing themselves kept dying, that would decrease the likelihood of one reaching a high enough level.

It just made logical sense to keep them alive.

On the same note, combat experience seemed at least in part based on how dangerous a fight was. To be more precise, adventurers and monsters both seemed to gain more experience when they were actually in danger but Innearth wasn’t completely positive what part of “danger” they needed.

…maybe they just needed to think they were in danger?

I wish I knew exactly what experience is. I can’t see experience like I can mana – except maybe in an ascension?

Honestly… If it weren’t for the way the system referred to the “combat experience” the first time we bagged a void whale – that it had “collected the experience” and couldn’t throw it away? – I’d imagine the system was just artificially increasing a number that didn’t mean anything.

I haven’t seen many situations where weak adventurers have been power levelled by strong adventurers… so I’m not sure if weakening demons would completely remove my actual goal. If I figured out a system to hold void whales down and let adventurers stab them, it feels like they wouldn’t get much experience…Or maybe it would count me as a participant?

Still think an instant healing/short term resurrection setup would be worth it.

Losing short-term steam while thinking about his goals, Innearth shifted attention to something he wanted for the floor. He wanted void whales for transcendents to fight, but he didn’t want them getting close and smashing into or attacking the facility.

This meant he needed a solid way to keep them away – more solid than a flat wall no matter how tempered it got.

To keep “them” away from the facility, Innearth wanted to make a boss monster and he wanted to work on it now while the demons finding the plane were still small.

Now, currently the roach knights were more than enough for any of their foes – Innearth even privately thought his newest batch might be enough to kill a whale assuming they weren’t surprised…but he wanted to be sure.

Additionally, while it was true there was a dragon roosting at the top of the party building claiming the whole area surrounding the tree…Innearth didn’t know how much he wanted to rely on them as a bodyguard.

Good defence…but as an external protector not one Innearth had any control over.

And so began the creation of a “defender”. The king of the roach knights! The newest pinnacle of Innearth’s current skill.

This boss monster started with a certain seed of an idea. Whenever Innearth focused on the void whales – despite knowing that size doesn’t mean everything yada yada…he felt like they were big and he wanted to meet them with something big in turn.

Innearth decided he wanted to create a giant. A monster as large as he could feasibly make while maintaining its strength.

That 25km long void whale was…around 4km tall and the 32km long one was basically 5km tall. Those were some of the sizes Innearth had seen and it was hard to imagine a fighter dealing with them less than that.

Innearth wanted a monster at least that tall but preferably larger. 10km? As tall as a side of the facility?

…that felt a bit too ambitious, he might need to temper his expectations.

Wanting to see what he was working with, Innearth began checking to see his competition. He looked about for the largest recorded dungeon monster.

How…big…Is…the…biggest…dungeon monster. Innearth searched the internet.

Instead of immediately finding large monsters, Innearth found large creations in general and scrolled through records to find what he needed.

The largest rooms and floors were all without a doubt, space mana cores. The record holders for large rooms were all growth mana affinities as well – the two synergizing and letting cores expand floors to several several times the outside's volume.

For a single room, the record was currently a dome 97km tall at the center and 420km in diameter. That was…massive. That was larger than most dungeons were in total! That was larger than Innearth’s whole dungeon by…too many times for him to feel good about.

As a sense of scale small clouds began forming inside it near the 15km mark and massive ones covered the entire middle section resting near 45-50kms tall. The whole top of the floor was looking down on a sea of clouds!

…and this was a single open room not a full dungeon. Innearth felt small. To make himself feel better he tried researching all the advantages this Core had over him – that helped a bit.

This record holder was held by an “ancient core” over 2000 years old and at least level 353 – all the information they had given was they were tier 18. Somewhere between level 353 and 383.

This Core even had a 5th unknown affinity to help spacially expand areas they picked up – one that was most definitely a triplet…something like gigantic mana or “humoungous room” mana. It makes sense they are building rooms that much larger than me.

Wounded pride mostly healed, Innearth continued to the main point of this search.

This same dungeon had the record for the largest monster – a stone based giant clocking in at a modest 50km tall – “modest”.

That was taller than Innearths current dungeon was deep.

No, don’t compete with specialists at their own game.

…the giant was mostly just a vanity project made to satisfy the record requirements –it could barely move, despite the year’s worth of materials and mana that had gone into its creation.

It still functioned as the absolute upper end of what was currently available and tracked.

Giants weren’t the most common dungeon monster but most cores that tried to make them left them around 100m tall on average – to a sapient 10m tall was massive and you could make something that “small” dangerous, pretty easily.

Much more promising than either the regular giant schematics or the insane outlier of a record, was some runners up designed with more than just insane size in mind.

There were several dozen giants that were around 8-12km tall each mobile and dangerous.

Considering so many cores had made giants that tall Innearth felt like he had a chance. Even if most of them were quite a bit higher in level than him that still felt "doable".

To sum up his justification. Size was a good multiplier against demons. It had diminishing returns against adventurers – magical effects were easier to pit against higher leveled adventurers but aside from a few exceptions were useless against demons.

Part of the roach knights' success was due to their larger-than-average size.

…Innearth had done enough research and self-convincing to start on this “massive” investment.

He started with a scaled-up roach design but had a flash of inspiration while watching some crystal treant spawn.

The bottom third or so was a massive many-legged void roach, while the top half was closer to a crystal dwarf. This preliminary centaur shape wasn’t…fully the end goal – Innearth knew vaguely what he wanted its skills to be and shape would help ease his circuits along to an absurd degree.

Carefully watching orcs currently delving in his dungeon, Innearth shaped the humanoid half closer and closer to them. Orcs had one of the simplest spell systems – similar to a lot of the simpler dungeon spells like material creation.

Temporary full body enhancement. Body part strengthening and instinctual enhancement of weapons. They moved mana about their body in patterns to create mostly internal effects. Orcs had some of the best internal mana manipulation of any race and internal magic enhancing physical attacks were one of the only methods of attacking demons.

Overall design very very roughly finished, Innearth worked on the inside.

This was…hard. Immensely hard, because he couldn’t just upscale a monster and expect it to be stronger let alone actually function.

Every single facet of monster building he could ignore at small scales was laid bare. Similar to how metal worms and slimes were basically just two materials with liquid flesh and spongy shells – but snakes required bones and liquid crystal muscles and interlocking crystal scales…creating a true giant required nearly every point to be engineered.

The true base of this boss was a set of cosmic void bones. They weren’t just some nice tubes or simple interlocking rings, these were a creation of multiple interlocking parts designed with movement and stability in mind. Every single bone was connected with a hinge – two interlocking sides around a peg that turned in only one direction.

These “joints” were surrounded in sacks of flesh and filled with “lower friction” kinetic liquid lubricant. Innearth couldn’t use the solid frictionless materials without grinding them to dust with the forces being applied, so this felt like a good alternative.

Thick steel-like tendons wrapped between different sections wrapping around spinning pulleys or set like simple springs. One or two of the most important joints were given steam mana hydraulics and Innearth drilled holes through the bones to embed these movement systems.

Of course, this initial design took ages and ages – but at the scale Innearth was working in, it would be impossible to print in one go. Because of that Innearth was printing out parts and assembling them at the edge of the metal field.

All his friends noticed the creation being built – it was hard not to notice the size of these chunks – and they had to be curious.

Abe: Hey buddy…whats that you got there.

Amy: I’m running out of stuff to do. Is this the next Yggdrasil?

…Innearth hadn’t meant to exclude his friends so a brief description of his project later and they had immediately begun helping.

…Innearth liked working on things together. All his favourite creations were joint efforts and the whole friend group working together were able to do quite a bit more than they could alone.

Queen running Yggdrasil strips along joints or replacing some of his tendons with Yggdrasil heartwood was indeed an improvement. Doc fixing all the kinetic distribution and friction manipulation? An improvement as well.

Joints now magically altered movement and force lines in an optimal manner and thick tubes of a sandy material acted as kinetic movement “sinks” magic shoving it all into them letting the massive creature stop on a dime.

A few ice mana heat sinks were added to fix those sinks heating up when used and liquid tubes started to wrap about the skeleton.

The body steadily grew. The silver planes were expanded to be wider – currently 2km wide and almost 5km long at this point. Yggdrasil grew ever upwards its middle section was nearly the height of the facility at this point…they would have to figure out how to protect it going forwards. A hidden and tempered tube expanding “Up”?

Demons were slain in vast numbers on the planes, their bodies dragged from further and further distances and disposed of in an ethical and sustainable manner – by tossing them to Yggdrasil's roots below.

The tree really was a great garbage can. Any other use of demon corpses was either madness laced – with hard-to-control effects – or let the demons regrow once more (tossing them into the void again).

It was dumb to just stop such a great activity so void whale fishing and bagging continued – one around 20km long was caught roughly every month and while they were spread out enough to cycle the monsters in his dungeon…a large number of ascended monsters still steadily trickled through.

A huge number of elves moved to right outside of Queen’s dungeon – an equally huge number of dwarves moved to the party floor or dungeon cities while they attempted to reach their Valhalla. The dragon was surprisingly silent. Other than occasionally disappearing on a “job” every few months – or leaving on strolls through the silver planes to have a quick demon snack – it was like they weren’t even there.

On a young dungeon timescale, all these events were happening in a nice spread-out speed but to Innearth’s current mindset? Everything felt like it was snowballing. Everything was happening too fast! Months flew past and another year rolled around. Innearth reached the relatively lacklustre “Tier 9” milestone at level 122 and looked towards his next goal.

Innearth (Dungeon Designation: Crossroad Link from Murek) Level 122 1/16236 exp to next level. System Access Level 9 -Level 143+ Stats Mana Regeneration 306.78 personal unit/min Mana concentration 3.50 AMU / personal unit Mana Storage 3242.739/56836.597 AMU Regeneration over time 17.89883707 AMU/s Time to Full Mana 49.9 Min Physical Storage 42% Capacity Age 15 years Current Year 2012 AS Distance underground 1225 meters Number of floors 53 floors Titles. Earth Mana Specialization, Crystal Mana Specialization, Void Mana Specialization, Customization, Unique Dungeon, Cosmic Void Mana Specialization, Mature Dungeon.

It should be noted that every single level a part of Innearth had been using mini descent gifts to help him shift his core ever so slightly downwards.

For the first four levels, he shifted by roughly "1,2,3,4" meters – getting slightly better each time and the next 16 were increased by double that learning speed (6,8,10...).

The final Tier up had been a massive jump in distance and Innearth was almost confident enough to start removing the training wheels of system help – descending on his own whenever he wanted “if he cared to”.

In more important news massive organs and the majority of the flesh was being grafted to the skeleton at this point. Blocks of pure mana from the ends of the filter were shoved like bags of sand in between magical muscles and a budding circuit system.

Innearth was creating almost an ecosystem of skill organs. Each organ was technically a separate living creature and the way he was combining some of them fed off this fact.

Skills designed to move or strengthen everything around it. Skills designed to help move things magically or improve the efficiency of certain actions. This boss ended up with a "gut" of sorts, with several small circuit-based monsters that fed on the boss and gave back strength in turn.

Sometimes skills were synergized with more typical organs – for example, large reservoirs of healing ambrosia paired with skills that quickly distributed the healing effect across the entire body.

While designing these individual skills, Innearth had some time to think about dungeon circuits. Literally, everyone in rank 4-5 knew of them – many even used some common designs or had taken the time to iterate a circuit they liked.

But none…none seemed to have reached the point he was at. None had cared or been single-mindedly focused to reach the point he had reached until now. Innearth really was a pioneer in this specific field – he was sure just releasing the concept of skill organs would revolutionize the world... and it was something he had started planning on doing someday. Someday soon or more accurately someyear soon.

He just wanted to become a tiny bit more of an expert before that point.

To facilitate this “becoming an expert” side quest, Innearth found a surprising magic system guide. One on a site dedicated to translating and archiving sapient information – some “book core” who even had a whole dungeon dedicated to the task.

This guide was a series of tests, challenges and goals you could use to increase your proficiency in any spell system.

Theoretically, you could get the same effects with different spell systems – you actually had to be able to do the exact same thing with different spell systems it was just much much harder in some to do so or cost quite a bit more.

For example, a classic test that Innearth started to consider completing was creating [Fireball].

Every single spell system should be able to do this simple task and the translated book outlined some examples.

In a chanting system, mana would resonate in a caster's voice empowering their words. Fireball could be cast in many different ways – but one of the most common ones for Fire affinity chanters was yelling “Fireball”. A more involved chant for non fire affinity chanters was something closer to “Burn for me mana internal. Spark of life within become burning power without. Shoot forward and burn my own, [Fireball]”

In an enchanting system, mana was embedded in words – similar to chanting magic given form through language. A typical scroll or multi-use item could be anything from an experienced user writing “Cast Fireball” to a more involved “series of steps”. Something like “Convert 100 units of pure mana to fire mana, absorbing all costs in the conversion and forming it into a ball the size of my head. When formed push the ball forwards using 50 units of pure mana converted into the lowest cost option for external movement and release from my control.”

Similarly, the runes for "fire mana", "ball-shape", and "release" could be chained together to create a rune'd object that cast a fireball when channelled through – or a more in-depth "couple dozen rune" version that could create the effect simply by being left alone after it was initially made.

The real challenge was conforming to the very strict regulations of what a [Fireball] was. To truly consider this challenge “won” it had to be done without any other spells or external inputs. For runes and scripting, it had to be automatically cast once within a minute of the design of the item, to be considered complete.

Innearth started this challenge with circuit design.

Making a monster that cast a ball of fire mana? Even ignoring his skill organs that did this job, that was an incredibly simple circuit he could currently embed in any monster shape.

…but making a monster could be considered using a different spell system – “monster creation” – and having to tell the monster to cast the spell couldn’t really be considered "automatic". It had to be a specific size and strength and cast a single time…there was a whole list of rules to follow for the task to be considered beat and the only one he would be cheating by not following them was himself.

Dungeon circuits were a way of giving skills to someone. While giving a [Fireball] like effect to a monster was child's play, actually casting a fireball through it…was actually hard.

To start, Innearth began meditating on his minor goal – almost sinking down into his circuit builder senses as he thought. He pushed and pushed trying to see how this effect could actually be done – considering different options and techniques.

Theoretically, the method you used to cast this spell didn’t matter – every single spell system had a different methodology after all – just the end result.

Finally, he started to hint at a solution and began to build.

Instead of designing a monster to host the “Skill”, Innearth dug down into crystal floor. He embedded the “skill” into a patch of dungeon flesh. He was…giving himself the skill but using the skill after he cast it still felt like cheating somewhat so the skill needed more setup.

Digging about laying balls and wires – mainly pure nodes but with a good number of fire and occasional kinetic effects – Innearth worked away before finally finishing his attempt.

This “skill” was a passive one that slowly drained mana “automatically” from the owner to fuel its effect. Mana was roughly manipulated in the following steps: converted to fire, pushed out into the air in a spot roughly 150cm above the ground, bound to some oxygen in the air to make it actually set as a spell, wrapped in the intent to “stay together”, and finally pushed forward at a constant speed "north" once it was finished forming.

After this first cast, the whole setup then pushed fire mana into key circuit lines – breaking the skill by burning out channels. This was to prevent the passive skill from starting to charge again – technically unneeded, but automatically casting a fireball every 20 or so seconds wasn’t conforming to the “single automatic cast” rule.

Using a circuit in a way that it wasn’t designed to work in was surprisingly helpful towards increasing Innearth’s control with it. He was really starting to feel proficient in the fact and suddenly he had a new plan. He made a similar setup but made sure it was embedded completely in the earth not himself – he tried to give the ground or maybe Gaia this passive automated skill instead of himself.

At first, nothing seemed to happen but then slowly a fireball formed and was cast seemingly completely out of nothing.

...Innearth felt ecstatic at this dungeon circuit abuse. He really felt like he completed the spirit of the challenge. There were a few more similar challenges – based around completing a task easy to do in one system but hard in others – and Innearth split of a part of himself to continue completing them.

At this point in time, the giant orc-roach-centaur was filled in enough that Innearth felt comfortable creating a main circuit in it.

Starting from the “head” of the creature, Innearth created a pure mana core on the upper end not just of what he could create, but what dungeons in general could create.

Tier 32. Roughly 55,000 mana. 32 layers deep. This core was a massive boulder of a creation that had to be created deep within a mana oven.

It was also theoretically the minimum size that Innearth needed to use if he wanted to create a monster with a soul/power source “as strong as a dragon”.

This "goal" got sort of fuzzy... but a tier 16 core used optimally like it was in his original roach knights was close to a level 256+ monster (his newest knights felt much higher than that but circuits tended to break this rule) and tier 32 cores in dungeon monsters had the potential to reach dragon level…

Following that logic, theoretically, a tier 64 monster core should be equivalent to a god... but alongside monster cores being harder and harder to make, there felt like a solid barrier that prevented even the strongest dungeons from making a monster core higher than level 63. Some invisible wall that couldn't be punched through. Maybe once a core reached tier 64 and godhood themselves?

…that was all beside the point. Innearth ran a single Tier 16 channel from the core in the head all the way down the “spine” of his monster. Outwards from that spinal cord, a wave of circuits burst forth – twisting into ribs, embedded into bones, wrapping about organs and nestled against the as-of-yet unlaid skin of the giant.

Innearth was almost in a trance laying these circuits – he wasn’t placing them in a system panel, this level of magic requiring him to pour over his monster's body himself. His influence travelled through nearly finished flesh and ate bits of it to fit his final addition.

Nearly two more months slipped by just of Innearth laying dense circuit lines. They had two main goals: one was trying to give the boss an orc “enhancement” spell system, and two was tying the entire design together. Innearth had a specific sort of passive skill he wanted for the giant. One goal nearly impossible in his initial hope and only reached by weakening it and endlessly making exceptions.

This passive skill let the boss act as if it were smaller than it actually was – treating its exactly 10km tall and 10km long at the bottom “shell” body as if it were a fraction of its real size.

Innearth really wanted to let it act like a small monster – a meter or two in length – but settled for its body magically being controlled as if it were closer to 1% of its current size.

"Finally" the skin needed to be laid.

As far as armour went, every solid portion of the body was covered in nice solid cosmic void plates. Its chest, shins, arms – more importantly, its entire head and precious core within were completely covered in a solid helmet.

Each leg was tipped with cosmic void hooves of sorts and most of the “roach shell” was solid.

Cosmic void did not take well to bending preventing Innearth from just covering the entire body and so he had to make do with interlocking chain mail – similar to the skin of the yeti.

The whole boss hulked despite not being alive yet laying on it's side like a small mountain range.

Innearth had expanded out in a whole area beside the facility so once the boss began standing up it would have some space to move in…but not a lot comparatively.

The silver planes beyond quickly tapered off with influence only a couple dozen meters above the “ground” this boss would only ever stand beside the facility moving back and forth in a short area beside it.

That was fine. This boss was a true guard of the facility, it didn’t need to move far.

The real final addition Innearth added to the boss – something he had been planning since he gave it a humanoid portion – was a long spear.

A lance of sorts made completely of cosmic void and filled with kinetic essence – taking a page from Doc’s book.

The "real" real final addition was some decorations. Carefully adding the finishing touches to the outside of the boss – two larger saucers of crystal for eyes and a thin layer of squishy skin on some of the more bumpy and ugly portions of flesh – Innearth was ready to give life to his creation. His friends had fallen off the design at one point but they all crowded back to witness its animation.

A spark of soul that continued to grow formed by the monster's side. It made Innearth feel weak – something that hadn’t happened once while giving life until now – Innearth was briefly reminded of how the first dungeon core killed himself and was worried... but the feeling quickly faded.

Zipping straight to the “head” of the boss, this spark wormed inwards and disappeared from sight in a single moment.

A pause, a deep pregnant pause where nothing happened and then slowly Innearth saw a literal wave of life and soul begin travelling over the top of the body.

A rushing fire of mana under the skin's surface that moved relatively quickly (something like 5m/s)… but took a comparatively long time to travel all the way from the head to rump of the newest knight.

Nearly a full hour later as the last section of boss was claimed Innearth felt a single powerful resonance.

When his first roach knight had awoken, it spoke directly into Innearth’s mind surprising him. This boss simply "felt" and "existed" and for a moment it was as if Innearth himself was feeling himself in a new body.

The link between them was momentarily strong enough to be overwhelming but slowly it faded. Slowly that sense disappeared as the part of his soul he had given the boss was separated fully but that single moment had been disorienting to the highest degree.

Using the lance like a walking stick to pull himself up, this new boss got to its many feet and stared about itself disoriented and then suddenly jarringly calm.