Gorm woke up with a huge headache, he felt terrible. But he also didn’t feel the need to immediately build a new floor. His urges weren’t completely gone, but they had toned down to an acceptable level. He had a new feeling of control, like he could, for the first time since becoming a dungeon, decide what to do and how to do it.

After collecting his thoughts for a while, he turned his perception outwards. The first Gorm wanted to contact was Melia. She was playing with a small beaver, which felt remarkably like the first monster from the first floor. Gorm wondered how it shrunk from a giant monster beaver to this new, small, size. But this could wait, first, he would greet Melia and Sek. Then he would concentrate on what had happened in the dungeon.

Melia was overjoyed that Gorm was back. But immediately started to complain about a hog clan that was bothering the beavers. She demanded him to make the fighting stop. Melia wanted peace and quiet when playing with her little beavers.

Because Gorm didn’t know what was going on, he promised her to consider it and fled from her ceaseless talking. He then searched for Sek and found him floating around on the second floor. Gorm almost wasn’t able to recognize him, Sek wasn’t black anymore. He now was a blackish grey. With his color the aura he gave of had changed, Sek felt more approachable and a lot calmer than before.

Sek's reaction to Gorm waking up was the opposite of Melia. He only greeted him back but didn’t say anything else until Gorm asked him about his change. But Sek didn’t know the reason, he had noticed that he was changing, but didn’t know why.

So Gorm asked him what Melia meant when she wanted him to stop some hogs from attacking the beavers. To answer the question Sek told him what had happened in his 87-year absence from the dungeon.

When Sek finished his narration, Gorm was stunned. To have 2 new sapients was huge but more shocking was that all his animals seemed so intelligent. How could animals form clans and tribes, they sometimes even had members from other species. He would need to investigate that phenomenon in depth.

Gorm also appreciated the rule that helpless animals had to be spared in fights and wars between tribes and clans. So he made the rule official. But he also added a new rule, it was to keep the sanctuary that Keeper developed safely. In the future he wanted Keeper to do his work not only on the second floor but in the entire dungeon.

He then returned to Melia and the beaver, he now knew was Beabea, to ask them about their idea to make the fighting between floors stop. He then visited Keeper to ask him the same thing.

After listening to their ideas, Gorm pondered for a solution that felt right to him. He had the idea to make the floor wars a monthly event that lasted one week. That would give the weaker first floor time it needed, while still keeping them on the edge. With this arrangement, Gorm hopped to keep the number of newly mutating monsters up, while giving them enough time to develop and fortify their strength. If it worked out like intended, he would implement this in all his future floors. Or at least for the part that was not accessible for outsiders. Because he wanted these floor wars to have a meaning, Gorm would make some floors more desirable for certain species than for others.

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With Melia's request settled, Gorm focused on Sek's discovery. He wanted to find out why the animals in his dungeon were so intelligent. So he observed their behavior. Some animal species, like the beavers and badgers, that originally were relatively intelligent and lived in groups, had developed simple languages to communicate among themselves.

Despite searching for a reason for over a year, Gorm couldn’t find one. So he decided to build his third floor. If the animals still showed the abnormal intelligence, he would at least know that it applied to new floors as well. From there he could then keep searching.

Gorm wanted the third floor to be a normal forest, but he liked the connection between the first and second floor so he created a one on the third floor. It would be one of the few water sources on the floor. He then proceeded to make more rooms. He didn’t use the method of the first two floors but tried the abilities he had. After he woke up, he didn’t feel like the abilities of a dungeon were unnatural anymore. He had understood that an uncorrupted dungeon was closer to nature than everything except for elemental spirits.

He created a huge room with the connection to the second floor and the river as a center. Then he created similar rooms all over the floor, he wanted more than one connection between the two floors. It would make the war less centralized. Gorm hoped this would increase the number of new monsters. The gigantic rooms were connected with numerous tunnels and smaller rooms.

With the basic layout done, Gorm selected the common forest ecosystem and started to place some plants in all the rooms. He then scattered a few other water sources on the floor. With that finished he waited a year so that the plants could fully populate the floor.

One year later he started to spawn some animals, he made sure that they had normal intelligence. This time around he also spawned one monster on the floor, a common mouse. He wanted to find out if it also developed a greater intelligence.

With his floor set up finished, Gorm only had to wait till the wildlife spread over the entire floor and a few more monsters were around before he introduced the floor war. He would make sure that in the beginning, only the third floor could attack the second floor and not the other way around.

Two years later Gorm felt it was time for the first floor war between the second and third floor. Until this point he could only observe slight increases in intelligence among the population of the third floor.

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With nothing to do anymore, Gorm looked at his status. He hadn’t done so since he woke up.

Status

Name

Gorm

Title

Natural Dungeon

Race

Dungeon Core Oak

Floors

47

Rooms

109

Age

622 years

DP

42

Level

3 (47)

Mana

98 020 / 580 000

Affinities

Nature

Mana Regeneration

500 per min

Specialties

-

Abilities

Natural Dungeon

Advanced Environment Creation

Cycle Creation

Growth Spurt

Creature Maturation

Clear Headed

Ecosystems

Endless Wilderness

Riparian Forest

Common River

Light Oases

Common Forest

Monsters

9567

Sapients

2

Bosses

Melia (Elder Ash Dryad)

Bonded Creatures

Seker (Death ??? Spirit)

Intruders

-

The most shocking thing about his new status was that Sek's race had changed. But his information wasn’t different. Gorm would have to talk with Sek about this later.

The increase in rooms, the huge number of monsters and the new ecosystems were easy to explain. But the increase in DP and the new abilities weren’t. After a bit of investigation, he found out that the new DPs were rewards, for example for the creation of a completely new ecosystem.

The abilities were harder to investigate, but he found out, that he gained the creature maturation ability 35 years into his sleep and the calm mind ability when he woke up. Now he only had to find out what they did.

Creature Maturation:

Due to the extremely fast pace at which your creatures become monsters you gained the ability to forcefully advance any animal in your dungeon to sapient.

Passively advances the probability of any creature advancing to a monster by 50%.

Calm Mind:

Due to a special ritual and the help of an elemental spirit you got rid of most of your urges and gained a calm mind.

Due to your calm mind, everything costs 25% less mana.

Gorm was stunned. He had gained two more passive abilities. Since he found out that anything passive was normally rare and good, Gorm was thinking of ways to obtain more passive abilities. He didn’t think it would be this easy. But he figured that it wouldn’t be that easy under normal circumstances.

With that sorted, he found Sek again.