Team Terra came into the first room of the second floor of the dungeon and found it to be much the same as the first floor first room, except the first room had a pride of lions in it and fruit trees in orderly rows. Leon noticed a marked difference in the speed and strength of these second-floor lions over the first-floor ones. But they were still far too weak to be a threat. The next room had a few wolves, and several western grey kangaroos. It was filled to the brim with orderly rows of what looked like bamboo to Leon.

The third room of the second floor had a hundred Giant Forest hogs, and they could actually have been dangerous. The fight was chaotic because the things were fast and had a lot of mass behind them most of them were pushing 600 pounds and they charged with ferocity. Leon fought with a spear stabbing bouncing around with lighting quick movements while felling nearly thirty of the things by himself. As chaotic as the herd of stampeding hogs had been no one was injured, just thrown around a lot before they could finally put down every last one of them.

“Yeah, this dungeon is definitely going to be ahead of the curb on danger rating. I’d wager that its actually going to start being dangerous to everyone at around floor 50 based on this.” Cynthia commented as Leon stored away the giant hogs.

“Is that a good or a bad thing?” Leon asked, hoping he hadn’t screwed everyone over by feeding the Dungeon so many potentially dangerous animals.

“It’s a very good thing. The more dangerous the dungeon is the more likely it is to provide rewards that are better. If anything, I hope that it starts getting even more dangerous sooner. It’s going to make this more of a landmark Dungeon than others and will get a lot more traffic than others if it is particularly dangerous. Especially since the monsters seem to very unique animals. I haven’t recognized a single one of the beasties we’ve encountered as of yet. Meaning that this place will probably get really popular.” Daisy chimed in, answering his question and then some.

Leon decided right then and there that he would prioritize dumping in as many new animals from Earth as quickly as he could into the dungeon. If more dangerous was more desirable. Then Leon was going to give it all of the options he possibly could. Teleporting to one end of the room Leon dumped every animal he’d made an embryo or egg of so far into the corner before teleporting back to his party. He’d made so many over the past month that he didn’t know the exact count anymore, he just knew that he was going down the list from A to Z and he was still in the C’s somewhere. It was a lot of animals and insects.

Moving on to the fourth room it was pretty much a mirror of the last floor. Stalactites and Stalagmites of various ores and protected by a pack or flock? Of 10 Northern Cassowary.

The fifth room turned out to be the same as the first floor as well. Except it had 15 Orangutan’s guarding it. Sixth room had 10 Red Kangaroos, seventh room had five Green Anacondas, eighth room had Leopards, ninth room had ten Gorillas, and the Tenth room had three African bull elephants.

Leon’s eyes went wide when he saw how huge Elephants were in person. By virtue of their sheer mass, they were actually dangerous if they could pin one of the party down. But their massive size and slow speed relative to the superhumans they were face had them standing very little chance.

After storing one of the corpses, Leon looked to where the staircase would be and found nothing but a large chest where the way down would eventually be.

“Looks like its only two floors deep right now. Not bad. The showcase of different animals is pretty awesome. And I’m pretty sure we’ll be facing even more variety pretty soon.” Leon said as he walked over to the chest and kicked it open. Inside he found a complete Lore Book series of earth magics. Twenty silver coins, ten lesser health potions and a sword very similar to Far’s. He quickly distributed everything and stored the Lore books he didn’t have any more for when he finished the Body Lore books on him at the moments so he figure he might as well read this new one even if he didn’t have a perfect affinity for earth magics.

“Yep, this is where it stops. See that crystal ball right there?” Lamia pointed to a crystal ball sitting behind the chest, “that’s the Exit Stone. We just touch it and it’ll teleport us back to the entrance. We’ve only been down here about 45 minutes, but we should probably report back.”

Everyone agreed and began vanishing out of the dungeon one by one. Leaving Leon as the last one in the Dungeon.

“I had a great time! Hope you make some different floor formats though. A predictable pattern will just take some of the fun out of everything. I’ll be back tomorrow with a few more animals for you.” Leon said before he touched the crystal and found himself standing at the exit alongside his party.

There was a round of applause from the gathered Mentors and Mentees when the party appeared. Leon and company accepted the applause and then went about giving their report on the dungeon and its current contents. Leon dumping the sample creatures that he’d brought back with him as a demonstration.

What followed after that was a ton of labor while the next group started their dive into the Dungeon. They began skinning and butchering the animals that Leon had brought back. Leon had never dealt with butchering before. It was messy work, though not necessarily hard for the group of strong students and several of the mentors.

It took several hours to butcher the 200 plus corpses, but at the end Leon and his party were the proud owners of all of the pelts that were still good. And half of the meat gathered. The rest went to everyone else. Leon ended up holding onto most everything. Keeping it all safely in his Utility Pocket where it would not rot or change before they had a chance to sell them when the Telepad went active.

Once Leon was meditating on his cot for the night, he used another voucher to get the skill Instant Harvest. It was a skill that allowed him to, if he had the tools on his person, instantly skin and butcher, mine, cut down trees into ready to use planks. It was completely a utility skill that would allow the party to go into the dungeon and return with the maximum profits that they could get out of it.

The he turned his attention to creating more of Earths modern fauna. Picking up where he had left off and just going down the list one at a time. Making embryos and eggs hardly cost any mana. Especially when it was practically microscopic creatures or insect eggs. And Leon’s mana capacity was only growing daily. Counting the mana that Leon was using to make everything He was actually coming out with a net gain of mana at the moment. Corey was getting better and better at drawing in mana and holding onto it. Leon was able to consistently make at least ten new animals from Earth every minute. Doing this for 12 hours a day he would be able to make every modern creature on the list within a month and be starting down the list recreating Earths history one animal at a time.

The next day Leon and company were not the first group into the Dungeon, they were the last. From all of the others they knew that the dungeon had gotten any deeper. But the temperament, disposition and numbers of monsters had changed up a little bit. It seemed that the Dungeon was shifting each floor to be a little more thematic, which was normal in Dungeons that were growing. Leon figured that by the time he’d fed every animal from Earth to the dungeon each floor would have its own specific theme of animals in it.

When Leon and his party went into the Dungeon the second time, they tore through it even faster than they had before but instead of leaving immediately they backtracked, and Leon got to work using Instant Harvest on everything. The greatest part of using the skill was that it instantly deposited everything into his Utility Pocket. After clearing out a good chunk of the resources inside the dungeon they headed to the Exit crystal and teleported out.

Before Leaving however, Leon dumped all of the new animals he’d made and commented about how much he liked what the dungeon was doing with making a theme for each floor.

Leon spent the rest of the day helping to arrange a depo for the Lumber he’d harvested and smelting down the ores into ingots. Leonardo Hephington was the Mentor in charge of resource processing and Leon had to give him ten percent of the ingots he’d gotten out of the ores from the dungeon but that was the price for using the smeltery. The mill was being set up by another Mentor but Leon’s Instant Harvest made that service moot for him. It made Leon wonder if perhaps he acquired a small smeltery if he could use the skill and have instantly processed ingots. It would definitely be worth it if he could. Though the Skill was a massive mana drain.

Lenora Fiddlesticks was the mentor in charge of setting up a tannery, which Leon knew would be something that he’d need to avail himself of. Each of the different Mentors had a specific function that they were going to be building and running until the three-year founding period was over. If they played their cards right, they’d have a hugely successful business set up by the time the place was ready for new inhabitants to show up.

Leon and the other Mentees were also allowed to start their own projects as well. They were allowed to claim any land that they were able to build on or convince the others to help them build on within that three-year period of founding. Leon was thinking of building a large home with a workshop for not only himself but also his family. So, staking his claim soon would be in his best interests.

The real issue for Leon in staking a claim was not his capacity to build on his own or bribing the others to help him into building. It was ensuring that anything he built would last. The little island that the Dungeon was on was composed of a giant mound of sand in the middle of the ocean. And sand was not a good place for building anything. Meaning that they literally had to start shoring up the very land around the Dungeon.

Leon actually had a plan for that. But he wasn’t sure how quickly he could accomplish it nor if it was going to be feasible. He was going to make a monster. A monster house. One that he could force to grow larger using mana and control its development. He could create a root like system that would continually grow and fortify the island and perhaps even expand it. It would obviously have to start off small, but then Leon could not only feed it mana to help it grow but also feed it the excess corpses from the dungeon. It was still in the ‘just an idea’ phase, but Leon was contemplating it heavily.

Walking around the island after having finished all of the work assigned him, Leon noticed another big inconvenience, High tide. When the tide was low the Island they were on was about three miles across at the widest point, with the shortest being about 2. The Island was rough circle if looked at from above. During high tide the Island was barely a mile wide. Meaning that building up the island was going to be a necessity if they wanted to have mainly dry land to build on. Watching the tide come in gave Leon an idea though. No one would complain about his claim if made it in an undesirable area. Namely, the edge of the island when it was at low tide. If he started it out as a house, then began expanding it to encircle the entire island… He could tackle making a wall and spreading roots inward to push up the land enough so that it would be dry all the time.

Returning to the long house, Leon approached the Mentors with what he wanted to make his claim. Other than an ‘Are you sure?’ his claim of fifty feet of the edge of the island at low tide circling the entire island was met with a shrug and marked down on the land’s claims book.

“You realize that this will put you in charge of land that is set aside for a defensive wall, right? If the guild needs to put the wall down it will cut into your claim quite a bit.” Malorie said as soon as she found out about it.

“I intend to use my particular combination of affinities to create a living wall that will do more than just serve as a mild deterrent for… I guess pirates… If I can manage it, it will raise the ground level of the rest of the island over time and make more land available. It will also give me control over a port for sea fairing vessels, and I hope to create a few towers to serve as airship landing zones as well. I might be one of the people who ends up controlling the majority of trade coming in and out of the city once it is one. It all really depends on how quickly I can get everything to grow though.” Leon explained

“If you can manage it then do it, and do it well”

“I intend to. This whole founding thing is really weird how the Guild goes about it though.”

“The Guild started doing things this way to prevent the massive amount of infighting that usually took place whenever a new dungeon was born. This way is slower but having a group of 100 go and start everything off for three years sets up a foundation that can quickly be expanded upon once they allow open access. In the long run it just ends up being better for profits for the Guild, which is all the higher ups really care about when establishing a new city, how profitable it is.”

“Hopefully I can finish the wall in three years. It should be possible, especially if I cross the threshold into Tier 2, I’ll be able to grow a wall very quickly once I get there.”

“A lot of things will change for you once you hit Tier 2, a wall that size would probably on take a couple months for you at that point. But getting there will require constant use of your skills and intense training. Growing the wall may actually help you with that.” She pointed out.

Leon nodded before heading over to his bed, It was time to make more monsters for the dungeon and plan exactly what he wanted for his Monster house/wall. Planning out the biology of a city sized living organism was not an easy task. There were things like physics and internal temperatures to consider. Should the exterior be bone? Or should it be carapace? Or a shell like a clam? Skin seemed to be just a bad idea, and having a hairy wall just seemed… Creepy. There was a lot to consider before he started his project and lot of mental math to do. Like how much a creature of that size would need to eat even if it were a stationary creature. He would need to give it the capacity to lure in prey and feed off of the things in the ocean like krill or something. He would have to add a photosynthesis function to it as well just to make it more self-sustaining. There was a lot to consider. He could also make it be like Corey and sustain itself off of ambient mana. Which would vastly lower its intake requirements. But eating food would make it grow a lot faster. He would also need to include a function to cease its growth and control exactly where and when it would grow.

Over the night of contemplation and planning Leon got close to figuring out exactly what he wanted to create. And had made good strides towards completing his goal of feeding the dungeon even more animals from Earth. Today they were second to last on the list of teams to enter the dungeon. And still it hadn’t made a third floor. But again, it had changed up the monsters on its first and second floors.

The first floor was now mainly reptiles with several Komodo Dragons as the final rooms challenge. The second floor had gone to just large cats, lions, tigers, leopards, and the like with only the food animal rooms having remained unchanged. Again Leon, Cynthia, Daisy, Lamia and Far tore through every challenge in the place with barely even a pause only taking about 20 minutes to clear both floors. Then Leon began harvesting.

They spent a good forty minutes gathering everything they could in their allotted hour long delve before teleporting out with exit crystal. Leon again hanging back to give the dungeon his new Earth animals and complimenting the dungeon on its redesign choices.

That day they assisted with the construction of another Longhouse before Leon retreated to his meditation and creating more monster for Dungeon.

The next two weeks passed in much the same manner. Leon’s harvesting skill was shooting up in level at a prodigious rate that surprised even him. His Utility Pocket now had well over a thousand animal corpses sitting around in it. And Leon was feeling like he was ready to start the creation of his wall monster that would also serve as his house. He’d settled on having the entire thing growing as a Stony Coral that would encircle the entire island. The Monster was a thaumivore and a combination of what regular corals used to eat and actual mouths that could be used to feed it. Ambient mana should be enough to sustain it but its capability to eat microbes and having actual orifices meant to have food deposited into for consumption should drastically accelerate its growth speeds when combined with its mana intake. The coral structure would be supported by large bone structures that would enhance its structural integrity. It would also start serving as an actual coral reef around the island to draw in and create an ecosystem around the island.

Leon used his custom tab in the create monster skill to create the biggest seed of this minion/house/wall/monster that he could. That amounted to a fifty-pound block of hard porous monster with a large mouth on one end that immediately started absorbing ambient mana. It was a mottled grey color similar to concrete. And had a very similar texture to concrete. But the structure was more bone than anything else.

Leon brought his blocky seedling of his eventual home and wall to the very edge of the island during low tide and plopped it down on the sand where the waves of the ocean were lapping against it. He could feel his connection to the thing the same as any other minion he’d made. But it was a lot like Corey in that its mind was not really a mind. It was completely dedicated to eating and growing as directed. It had no will of its own. His centipede monsters and Imp had more autonomy even though they were still like drones.

Leon let his mana recover while sitting there on the beach in front of his seedling of a monster while popping out chunks of meat from his inventory and shoving them into the things mouth. Once his mana had recovered a bit Leon began feeding a trickle of mana to the monster at a rate that matched his regeneration. Directing his new monster to grow as he kept a steady feed of mana and meat going into it.

His soon to be house monster or monster house was growing at what most would consider an alarming rate. After only an hour Leon had managed to grow the block into a slab about 2 feet thick and ten foot by ten foot wide. Then he directed the mouth to grow much larger, turning it into what looked like a well sticking out of the slab, five feet tall and a good four feet across. Throwing giant chunks of meat into it now to provide even more fuel to is growth. He started directing it to grow root like protrusions out of the bottom driving them several dozen feet down into the sand to make sure that the thing wouldn’t get pushed or moved in any way by the tide when it came in. Then he extended one end into the water, keeping it going along the sandy floor about fifty feet out into the water. Every few feet he directed it to grow another root down into the sand to ensure that it remained anchored. Once he had it out far enough Leon branched the end of it into two different directions to start encircling the island. Noticing as he continued to grow the monster that the underwater portions were extending their little tentacle formations out to fish for bacteria, phytoplankton, and any other materials it could use as food from the water. Just as he had intended.

As Leon continued to pour mana into his creation at a steady rate, concentrating on where he wanted it to grow, he realized that he really needed a name for the thing. Seeing as he’d based it off of a stony coral from planet Earth and heavily modified it with biology dependent on mana, he decided to name the monster Cynarina in honor of its progenitor. With names out of the way Leon kept focusing on feeding Cynarina, both with his mana and the corpses of tortoises and hogs from the first and second floors. In the first night of growth, Leon managed to get a really good start. He focused on what he wanted the monster to do and how he wanted it to continue growing and left that as its instructions before he went back to the longhouses.

With a new day here and his own plans begun, Leon was rearing to go and harvest more shit from the Dungeon. He already had more animals for it ready to go, and he was looking forward to the dungeon finally opening up a third floor. The mentors said that usually when a dungeon was taking a while with opening another floor it was either making a massive floor, or it was getting ready to open up many more floors all at once. Dungeons sometimes did their floors in batches. Leon was looking forward to whatever it would be throwing at them next. Obviously, it wouldn’t be dangerous yet, but it would definitely be more interesting than facing the same twenty rooms over and over again.

And so, the weeks wore on with little change in the Dungeon. Though the rooms were now heavily altered from the first time Leon and his party had entered the Dungeon. The first floor was now much larger, it had the same number of rooms, but each room was getting pretty massive. And the rooms were filled with a variety of snakes, lizards, and even amphibians. Not every animal inside was aggressive now either. There were little frogs that minded their own business, skinks, and chameleons, a variety of small lizards that scampered about the undergrowth. But the selection of aggressive animals within the first floor had also been overhauled and their placements and behaviors had become more refined. Also, the arena rooms had changed into more environmental settings with sparse resource collection areas. There were even little ponds with a variety of different fish in them now. And that was just the first floor.

The second floor had easily doubled the size of the first floor, and it had settled into its big cat monsters within heavily wooded areas throughout the entire floor. Very similar to the first floor but with even more variety, tons of little critters like rats, rabbits, gophers, and even birds were everywhere on the second floor. It was like walking into a heavily populated jungle down there now. With tons of large predatory felines jumping out of trees and ambushing from the cover of bushes.

The Mentors were mentioning that the massive variety of monsters already present, and the fact that the dungeon had phased out using multiple monsters on the first two floors, meant that the dungeon must be preparing a full Biome floor for its third level. Which was exciting them to no end. This would be the earliest Biome floor any dungeon had ever created and would make it a huge attraction in the future. The amount of resources that the dungeon was pumping out was also an indicator that it was developing far more rapidly than they had expected it to. Its potion rewards had gotten significantly better, the quality of weapons and gear that it dropped had improved, and it was dropping Lore books with nearly every run. And had even dropped a few skill books.

The dungeon hadn’t made any changes to the current two floors for at least a week now though, and Leon was starting to get bored of the slog. They’d been here for four months now, and Leon had just finished creating all of Earths modern fauna every single creature that had been present in Earths biosphere was now created. Leon just had to feed the dungeon the very last batch on his next run through it. Him and his Team were the second team to go today, and tomorrow they would be the first.

Leon wasn’t surprised when they had their run, and nothing had changed. Leon’s party demolished every aggressive creature in the place and collected as many resources as they could before their hour ran out. Leon was mildly disappointed that he hadn’t received a new title for all of the creatures he had fed to the Dungeon, especially considering he had just reached a massive milestone in in giving it every modern animal that Earth had to offer.

As much as the dungeon hadn’t changed, the area above ground had been altered massively. Nearly everyone now had their own houses built already. Their areas claimed and the businesses that they were building would be ready for trade very soon. The vast quantities of processed goods everyone had amassed was a beacon of wealth. Leon was actually pretty impressed with how much wealth they had all accumulated after four months of daily Dungeon diving and plundering. The Mentors had nearly finished setting up the Telepad platform, meaning that they would actually be able to start trading with cities soon. And the ground around the dungeon entrance had been massively altered by two of the Mentors who had earth magics. Most of the island, all the way up to where Leon’s claim started in fact, had been transformed into a single solid chunk of stone that matched the color of the sand. Roads had been established appropriately and everything was looking fairly orderly. Most of the island still flooded every time the tide came in, but Leon was going to be taking care of that fairly soon.

Leon’s Cynarina had grown massive now. It was almost encircling the entire island now, at least under the water. Leon had made a design change choice by deciding to extend the thing under the water all the way out until the water started actually getting deep. At low tide the water surrounding the island was only about six to ten feet deep extending out for nearly a hundred yards before the depth started to plummet. So, Leon had decided to make the actual wall all the way out there where it started getting deeper. He was going to cover the entire area in Cynarina and make a watertight seal with the area where everything became stone. He only had about a mile to cover yet, and his foundations would be set. Then he would grow Cynarina up until it was level all the way to the walls which would hold the ocean out. He would leave tunnels and little caves within her structure to allow fish and the like to have habitats throughout the entire structure. As well as growing a massive reef down into the deeper waters around the island when the time came. For right now he had made himself a large house at the original location where he’d established Cynarina to begin with. And had a pit inside of it where he could dump about fifty corpses at a time for the massive monster to consume.

Inside his home Leon had gone with a decidedly spartan setup. He had a wood burning stove that he had made himself. A table and chairs enough for five people, also made himself. And a bed which he’d taken from the longhouse. All in all, Leon was doing pretty well for himself.

He settled into one of his chairs beside the feeding pit after another day’s labor and began funneling mana into Cynarina and directing its growth actively, occasionally dumping a few more corpses into the pit to help provide more fuel for expansion. With just a couple more days of this Leon would be ready for phase two of the growth. Hopefully the Dungeon would be different tomorrow. He would wait a few days before he started in on feeding it everything that had ever gone extinct on planet Earth. That was a much larger endeavor than just feeding it the stuff that had been alive when Leon had been around.