I was going to get in touch with Wes tonight but one of the governors decided to meet with him privately in his sparsely furnished office. I decided not to speak with him yet as it was getting late and I didn’t want to cut into his sleep. The citizens of Sevit generally stuck to the day/night cycle because lighting was scarce. Though, and I’ll definitely need to look into this later, the governors’ carriages included magic lighting!

I’ll be sure to contact him right after he wakes up in the morning.

In the last two weeks, I’ve mostly been engaging in tedious, yet much needed dungeon tasks. I’ve slowly expanded my domain via the continuous excavation of my dungeon. Rather than focusing on extremely large rooms as I had in the past, I’ve been hollowing out extensive tunnel networks and smaller, more specialized chambers.

I’ve shifted my design to this new approach because of my growing fear of cave-ins. What’s incredible to me is that the vast open expanses beneath the surface of the world, called Melk by the humans, are able to exist with seemingly minimal structural support. Sure, the cavern I’d sealed off had many vertical gill-like protrusions from the walls which looped over themselves like a folded towel to provide support to the broad ceiling which loomed over the subterranean forest, but it was still impressive that such a wide cavity could occur under the immense weight of the stone above. Likewise, the long vertical crevasse with the rapidly flowing river at its bottom was a marvel of nature and seemingly opposed to the constraints of physics.

From what I’d observed, the stone of this world isn’t any more capable of bearing loads than it was from my reality. I mean, I suppose these open expanses aren’t that impossible considering Deer Cave in Earth’s Borneo expressed similar proportions, though, to be fair, it was at a much shallower depth.

Regardless, I do not want a cave-in to occur in my dungeon, so I’ve decreased the density of my tunnel networks and chambers by spreading my operation out over a wider area. In fact, I’ve even managed to breach a couple of naturally occurring tunnels that are similar to the ones I sealed in the cavern. I’ll explore those later. The new layout of my dungeon features a dendriform arrangement, I have established wide ‘highways’ with smaller roads branching off from the sides and even narrower paths branching off from those, interspersed with chambers of varying shapes, sizes, and ecologies.

Though I’m roughly following a dendriform plan, I’ve heavily geometricized the tunnels with straight lines and uniform curves and slopes. All of this is to ensure the terrain is easily navigable for ant-pushed carts as well as to provide flexibility for future expansions.

And, to be honest, the aesthetic pleases me.

Calling some of the tunnels highways is by no means an exaggeration. I’ve been constantly felling both the yellow tower-caps in the forest cavern as well as the tree-sized white pon pon mushrooms I’d initially engineered to inhabit the ember blossom garden to fuel my cart production. Both types of fungiwood are suitably durable for the construction of ant carts, so in addition to their natural propagation, I’ve been manually spreading their spores throughout my dungeon to seed my halls with the next generation of building materials.

I’ve been constantly manufacturing ant carts, and, at this point, I’ve become quite proficient at producing them quickly and effortlessly. Indeed, my ability to improve at, and become accustomed to repetitive tasks goes beyond just “practice,” from a human psychological perspective. With repetition, I become much more capable of completing certain tasks almost subconsciously.

In other words, I sacrifice much less of my focus on repetitive tasks the more I practice them, to an extreme degree not seen in humans. I’m much better at multitasking now than I was in my previous life, and I can only imagine that’s a result of my new body.

I’m bringing this up now because I’ve noticed that I’m almost (but not quite) to the point where I can simultaneously focus on mining/levitating blocks and complex tasks such as reading! In perhaps just a few more weeks, I bet I’ll have no trouble digesting the contents of a book while also cutting blocks from stone and placing them on ant carts at the same time!

The roads laced throughout the halls of my dungeon are now bustling with activity; carts of several models, as I’ve been iteratively improving upon their design, trundle down the overgrown thoroughfares. In some high traffic routes, the floor vegetation has been completely trampled by the unceasing flow of vehicles, resulting in muddy ruts being worn down by the constant passage of wooden wheels. Along the walls march vast vein-like trails of regular sized tiny leafcutter ants hauling multicolored parasols of cut leaves that’ll be taken to the vast fungus gardens they rely upon for sustenance.

Truly, the interconnected leafcutter ant colonies have reached staggering sizes and degrees of organization that would’ve been impossible in their wild counterparts. Through the careful application of dungeon compulsions, I’ve managed to alter their behaviors to accommodate my dungeon helpers and the recently eclosed super helpers along with other intelligently designed (by me) efficiency policies for them to carry out. Many of the chambers in my dungeon serve only to house leaf cutter ants.

I’ve treated my entire dungeon as one gigantic ant colony, designating certain regions to specific tasks. Most notably, I’ve centralized the leafcutter’s fungus gardens. I engineered a massive chamber rivaling my disk room in size whose sole purpose is to feed my ants. The room’s walls are inlaid with deep stone shelves filled with the symbiotic fungus. The center of the room is also dominated by dozens of thick pillars of rhyolite which are likewise pocked with fungus containing recesses. Along the floor and ceiling flow countless minute worker ants whose jobs are to provide the garden with mulched leaves, eradicate pests and diseases, or harvest fungus to be fed to my dungeon helpers.

The constant and widespread decomposition of the gathered leaves and other cuttings in the room produces a dangerous amount of heat and waste gasses. To control the climate in the room, I have my dungeon helpers cart in crude wooden barrels filled with cool water to act as heat sinks. Once the water approaches ambient temperature, it’s then carted out to be dumped into the large pond at the center of the sealed cavern. It’s an inefficient system, I know, but it gets the job done for now. In the future when I’ll need a much larger fungus garden room, I’ll redirect one of the brooks spilling into the cavern for active water-cooling.

This specialization of the rooms in my dungeon has allowed me to substantially drive up the ant carrying capacity. The number of dungeon helpers under my control has swelled to a staggering eighty thousand individuals, with a combined mass exceeding that of three full-grown african elephants.

The number of normal leafcutters who supply them with food is, get ready…approximately twelve billion individuals, or nine elephants worth. Really, it’s hard for me to even wrap my head around that figure…

And that’s to say nothing of the overall biomass in my dungeon! Each tunnel is lined with dense mats of lush plant life and other organisms. One thing I find really fascinating about the subterranean flora I’ve assimilated is that they come in all colors, not just green. It seems that the process of arcanasynthesis has little effect on pigment. Or maybe it does, and the plants and fungi are simply utilizing different wavelength analogs? There’s so much to discover!

I’ve actually had to direct the leafcutters to be less choosy about the species of harvested flora as they were stripping some areas of all the leafy green vegetation which resulted in a temporary drop in biodiversity. My internal biodiversity is proportional to my mana regeneration, as nonsensical as that is, so you know I couldn’t’ve tolerated that!

Similarly, the flora I’d rescued from the volcanic eruption was having a tough time competing against the species native to the breached cavern which was, at this point, entirely integrated into my network. I’m artificially maintaining the biodiversity by instating soft conditional directives for the myriad herbivores under my control.

I’ve also widened the one-kilometer-long passage to the human’s mine and added new tracks and corresponding large carts plus mechanisms to accommodate the increased stone block throughput. I’m not so much of a fan of rope-pulled carts as I was when I’d first implemented this system. One kilometer is essentially the practical limit on distance for such a system as the thick hemp rope is very heavy. Another limitation is that the passage has to be perfectly straight, making it a highly inflexible design.

I know what you’re thinking; why not integrate the gear train into the cart itself? That's a valid question, however, the gear train mechanism itself is very heavy and takes up a lot of space. Incorporating it directly into the vehicle would severely impact its overall performance, even more so than the jerry-rigged solution I already have in place. This is because the strong torques the mechanism is subjected to would break the fragile wooden gear teeth if it was any smaller. Once more, the unattainability of precision metalworking mocks the engineer in me. I will not leave this injustice unpunished!

Onwards, a few days ago Mr. Normal voiced a memory notification informing me that my first batch of super helpers had eclosed. Originally, I’d assumed couldn’t sustain the initial batch of five hundred, however, I’d underestimated my recent growth rate. In a couple more days, another batch of one hundred will hatch, followed by another just a few days after that!

These bruisers come in at a length of a half-meter, making them more than capable of seriously injuring an adult human one-on-one. Not that I would allow a fair fight to take place, hehehe.

Unlike my dungeon helpers, I didn’t create my super helpers for manual labor, though I see no reason to not also use them as such. No, I created them as soldiers. Though not quite as powerful as the terrifying meter-long venomous cave centipedes, they mature much sooner, allowing me to build up my forces significantly faster. Speed is everything while I’m this vulnerable. Indeed, I only have about two hundred cave centipedes of varying maturity, a number that is about equal to what I started out with. Their breeding has been temporarily offset by the casualties the mage inflicted.

If I’d had five hundred super helpers when he attacked, things might’ve been very different. For starters, I might’ve been able to subdue him quicker and even disarm him, making capture a possibility.

Also, while I’m on the admittedly depressing topic of the mage’s death, why didn’t Mr. Normal add his species to my memory? What gives? He most assuredly died in my terrain, in fact, his skeleton is even lying where he fell! Picked clean by the ravenous ecosystem I’d cultivated… While I do need to look into this, I’m not exactly sure how I even can.

I’m actually a bit horrified that I didn’t even consider giving him a proper burial, I need to get on that.

Anyway, it’s time to put my super helpers through their paces. I noticed that it took their exoskeletons much longer to harden than regular ants, which is fascinating. I’m tempted to say that’s a result of the square-cube law, but I can’t be certain, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was more nuanced than that.

I carve out a few differently massed stone blocks from the ceiling of a random chamber, allowing gravity to drop them to the floor. The originally exposed side of each block is covered in dense moss and other plants who’ve rooted themselves in the fertile bed. It never ceases to amaze me how readily the flora found in my dungeon and the surrounding caves colonize bare stone. In fact, it’s so incredible that I refuse to believe there isn’t magic trickery at play, how would they even acquire enough nutrients? Perhaps they utilize magic to extract material from the stone? I really do need to build a microscope someday.

I call three super helpers over to the chamber I’ve selected as today’s testing grounds and also levitate my collection of wands and some magicite over.

I almost feel sorry for them.

Almost.