In the early days, when I first constructed my primary archer pod chamber, I included a somewhat wide and extremely deep pond in the center. Without any means of agitating the water, it’d mostly stagnated and now serves as a home for algae and mosquito midges which breathe atmospheric oxygen. Up until now, I’ve only used it for water storage.

I think I’ll probably leave this area alone, I’ve come to appreciate the aesthetic of the swirling sludge saturated with a strange variety of cyan algae. It amazes me that arcanasynthesis allows producers to plentifully inhabit all depths. How wild must this world’s oceans be? Combined with the overhead purple glow from the archer pods who share this room, the deoxygenated water actually looks quite nice. Plus mosquitos are important.

I wish to excavate a new aquatic habitat complete with flowing water which will be able to support a greater variety of life, thus increasing my mana regeneration rate.

Ok, fine, I might not have much use for my absurdly high mana regeneration right now, but I get the impression it will be useful in the future; besides, a more productive environment offers other previously mentioned boons. Oh, and frankly, growing simply fills me with joy. At this point, I’m like some sort of super gardener.

Now that I think about it, that’s kind of odd; I never cared much for gardening in my previous life. Sure, that could be blamed in part by how expensive such an enterprise was in space, but still.

Needless to say, I love it now. Micromanaging my domain is a wonderful way to relieve stress.

I want this new aquatic chamber to be relatively massive. Though my operation hasn’t grown large enough to allow me to excavate an area as large as the captured cavern, I can still do a lot, given time.

Sadly, for now, time is of the essence, therefore I will prioritize the flooding system.

Here’s my plan so far; I will carve out a wide vertical shaft which I will connect at the bottom to one of the random lava tubes leading away from the captured cavern that the pond currently spills into. With a few adjustments to the fortification I have in place there, it should have no trouble handling the greatly increased water flow rate.

The top of the vertical shaft will open up through the riverbed on the surface with a narrower pipe. Pressurized water supplied by the massive river should travel through the shaft all the way to the captured cavern where it will exit both my dungeon and care.

Along the shaft, say just above and to the side of the cavern, will be the cistern I’m planning on filling with aquatic wonders. In turn, it’ll be connected to the rest of the dungeon to allow species to move as they will.

Actually, if I want the cistern to have a current, I should force the water to move through its length before continuing its descent into the depths of the world. Therefore the shaft will come in two parts. The first will run from the riverbed to one end of the cistern. The second will run from the second end of the cistern to the lava tube outlet.

I guess that means it’ll be two shafts.

Anyway, the shafts will feature numerous horizontal offshoots that will connect with the rest of my dungeon. Water will not flow through these as they’ll have an upward slant. In an absolute emergency, I will clog the upper shaft such that it backs up with water and thus the head-pressure will force it up the sloped horizontal exits and into my dungeon. This will flood everything.

As my time is limited, I’ll keep the cistern small. Future expansions won’t be difficult at all, though I will have to reroute and fill in quite a few access tunnels in the area.

It has been a long time since I fully mobilized every cart in my fleet. I’ve been constantly building both regular ‘ant carts’ as well as the larger gear driven and rope-pulled version which makes the trip to the cache. That method is highly inefficient but very satisfying. Even so, lately I’ve had a few ideas for a super helper-powered Impulsoria-like locomotive, though I’d need to commission some blacksmiths to help make it a reality. That’ll be something to look into after I claim the subterranean canyon.

Despite this, the population growth of my ants has been slowing down in the past couple of weeks. I’m nearing the carrying capacity and I don’t want to sacrifice biodiversity to push it any higher. Once more, claiming the canyon is the most immediate solution to my problems.

Halting all extraneous digging and starting from the bottom, I begin to carve the first block away from what will soon become the lower shaft.

…

Three weeks have elapsed and the shaft is nearly complete. That sounds like a long time, and it is, but I got a lot done so it’s not so bad!

One thing I didn’t account for was the verticality of this project. As my carts are unable to traverse steep terrain, they definitely weren’t able to travel up the tall passage. Therefore I had no choice but to gently levitate dislodged blocks to the ground far below. Combined with the sheer depth of my dungeon and thus the required length of the shaft, this was a setback.

Though it had all rights to be, it was not a major setback. This difficulty was almost entirely offset by the time savings offered to me by [Plastic Consciousness]. From what I’ve gathered so far, it is a boost to my already incredible ability to multitask as a dungeon core. By now I can almost focus on two different things with the same allocated attention I could muster when I was a human. If my current growth continues, I should be able to pull off full human-level attention on two things at once. To say nothing of the fact that I already have no trouble splitting my point of view into nearly a dozen distant reference frames. I wonder if there are any other boons (or even drawbacks) associated with [Plastic Consciousness] which I’ve yet to discover.

Anyway, I also kept in contact with Wes and took a few breaks to spy on the goings-on in Sevit. Of note, the wall is now under construction. Apparently the Lyrian Empire has access to concrete, though it is of inferior quality to what I’m familiar with. As such, the wall is almost entirely comprised of my wonderful standardized rhyolite blocks.

In addition to the blocks, I’ve also started exporting ember blossoms. As a result, I’ve been raking in heaps of cash.

In the future, I might use my growing wealth to hire educators, though I’ll have to figure out how that’ll work. In the meantime, I’ve purchased a few more books related to magic and runecrafting, even though I have yet to finish my current stack. Of particular interest is “The Dictionary of Glyphs” which was paradoxically written by the exact same group who wrote “Principles of Runescript” and “The Introduction to Arcane Principles.” This book was just put into print (An entirely arcane process, or so I hear.) this year. It is basically a long, but very far from complete list of the common two-dimensional glyphs and symbols which many runes are composed of. Included are very brief descriptions of what they do and how they interact with themselves and the world.

This is a big deal, from what the merchant vending the book said, this is an unprecedented publication; never before have the secrets of runecrafting been revealed so publicly. Sure, it’s still unscientific and basic by my standards, but apparently, these three books have sparked a renaissance in the Lyrian Empire, their country of origin. This, in turn, has contributed to the nation’s recent dominance over its immediate neighbors as well as the so-called “Upheaval Project” which I keep hearing mention of.

I keep forgetting to ask Wes what that is.

The group who wrote them is the Lyrian chapter of “The Followers of Zote,” who I’ve already learned to be the ‘god of magic,’ a member of a vast pantheon. According to them, their ‘god’ mandated that they spread arcane knowledge to the world in order to further ‘arcane knowledge.’

Other than the religious aspect of their order, I could see myself getting along with these folks. Hopefully, they’ll visit Sevit!

Anyway, I can’t wait to resume my reading and research.

Where were we? Ah yes, I was recapping what happened over the previous three weeks.

Larger wildlife has started to reclaim the surrounding land. I’ve heard mention of dangerous critters emerging from the first subterrane to settle the unfilled niches. This includes ‘wolves, monitors, giant cave salamanders, snatchers (Who I know to be griffinfly nymphs.), siegeanax scouts, giant ants, microwyverns, and ‘jagged beasties’ which are said with fear. I don’t know what all of those are, so maybe I can put out a purchase request for captured animals.

Speaking of which, I just bought the seeds of every crop grown in Sevit. Other than potatoes, none of them resemble anything I’m used to. I’ll take a closer look at everything once they sprout in my primary germination chamber.

Additionally, I bought captured stray dogs, twenty-three of them! They all resemble the Saluki breed from Earth and should make nimble runners. I doubt they’ll have much trouble surviving in my dungeon, but just in case, I’ve instructed the cave centipedes to leave them alone unless attacked first. I would compel the dogs to do likewise, but they aren’t naturalized dungeon denizens yet.

Just like every other animal native to the surface, they seem to have no trouble seeing in the dark. Can all eyes perceive mana in this world? That’s certainly weird considering mana is not a form of light.

Well, probably not…

Onwards, I also placed an order for a huge set of metalworking and runecrafting supplies, I told Wes, “I want them to bring every tool imaginable, I’m interested in everything.” After securing my promise to purchase a baseline amount, he agreed and wrote a letter to the merchant company nominally employing him. Apparently, the Watergarde Merchant’s Company wanted a monopoly over Sevit, but the city’s unexpected population explosion has made such a plan impossible to sustain.

And finally, there has been a string of seemingly unrelated murders. Three farmers and two of their wives have been found dead so far.

Due to this, along with the emergence of cavern critters, the need for further defense and law enforcement has grown. With elevated salary offers, I expect to see qualified people immigrating soon.

...And that’s just about everything worth noting.

At this point, the two shafts are (hopefully) able to carry water as planned. The cistern itself is also coming along nicely. At first I was afraid that flooding it before it was completed would make finishing it difficult, but that was me just thinking in human terms. With a quick test, I was able to confirm that the presence of water in no way impedes my ability to cut stone blocks with precision.

Although it’s only a fraction of the way from being completed, it’s already quite massive. Indeed, it’s the largest artificial room in my dungeon already! In designing it, I went for a more natural look. Though I didn’t waste my time trying to form faux-stalactites and other such features, I did give surfaces a jagged and highly irregular finish and also created the room with a multitude of different geometric features.

From the top, down, the whole chamber is in the shape of a rough oval, and when I say rough, I mean rough. Calling it an oval is very much a stretch. There are no consistencies present; along the shores are shallows, drop-offs, crags, fjords, cliffside caves, and really any other stone-water interface you can imagine. The interior of the deep cistern is interspersed with concave pillars of solid stone to keep the ceiling aloft and the floor is terraced to provide ample surface area for each depth level. The center of the room is generally the deepest but this isn’t the case everywhere as I’ve also included islands around some of the pillars.

I’ve carved out alternate tunnels for a fraction of the water coming in from the shaft to follow such that there will be cascading waterfalls and small brooks along its length besides the main inlet.

All told, the oval is around forty meters wide at its narrowest and seventy at its widest. The ceiling itself is just five meters above the planned waterline, but the water will be seventeen meters at its deepest!

The whole point of this room was to allow for greater biodiversity for me to play with, so I did my best to provide the greatest variety of habitats without affecting other things such as atmospheric composition, climate, etc.

All that’s left now is to open the floodgates, so to speak.

I left a thick margin at the top of the shaft because I didn’t want to accidentally tap into the riverbed prematurely. As the head-pressure is going to be quite high at the bottom of the first shaft, I want to limit the inlet’s diameter to be less than that of the shaft. I’m taking care to refer to the shaft as a ‘shaft’ rather than a pipe because I do not wish for it to fill completely with falling water, lest the pressure push it up the check slopes of the horizontal passages leading all over my dungeon. The inlet, of course, will be an airless pipe to the riverbed concentric with the shaft. As it’s already at the very top of the shaft, I suspect the pipe segment won’t exceed ten meters.

The shaft is an enormous six meters in diameter. With a dirty mental calculation accounting for the depth of the river, I find that the pipe inlet should be roughly two meters wide to allow for my desired throughput.

It helps that I’m both an experienced aerospace engineer and the improbable existence that is a dungeon core.

To avoid any bursting, I start by boring a narrow six-centimeter-wide tunnel through the remaining layers of bedrock.

Upon breaching the bed above, a jet of mud followed by clear water blasts out from the still-unfinished pipe and enters free fall inside the shaft.

This is really exciting! But as much as I want to power through with widening the pipe as fast as possible, safety takes priority.

With my own wellbeing in mind, I slowly widen the pipe to the full two meters while carefully observing the cistern which is slowly filling up.

Despite the absolutely torrential flow now occurring, the incredible volume of my new aquatic room will take a few hours to fill. Once it does, the overspill will enter the second shaft and exit my dungeon from one of the lava tubes.

I must now wait.

…

It is nearly full! Extending a thread of my domain up through the loaded pipe, paying no head whatsoever to the raging current, I observe the river’s surface to see if a whirlpool has formed. Unsurprisingly, one has, however, I'm sure it'll just be passed off as a random eddie.

Just as I refocus on the cistern, the waterline has reached its maximum and the second shaft is wetted for the first and hopefully final time. With the overflow once more falling deep into the crust, I trace its path to the exit of my domain.

And I simply spend the next few minutes watching it all with pride.

Hmm?! Did I feel something ticklish?

I focus my attention on the source of the now-alien feeling; the pipe.

Just as I do, it gets crushed inwards and subsequently seals completely. The previously solid ceiling of the shaft surrounding the pipe’s entrance instantly fractures and large chunks of stone tumble all the way to the cistern below.

What?!

And just like that, the flow of water was immediately halted by this mysterious event. What could’ve possibl--

A primal and external shriek bombards my mind through a mental link.