Valens was busily expanding his twelfth floor, he had gained quite a lot of experience from his last invasion so he could make a lot of new floors. The only problem was that he wasn’t sure what he wanted to make. Sure he could continue with the forests but the comments about all the forests being boring had stung just a little. He also thought it would be interesting to force invaders into environments that they weren’t expecting or suited for.

Currently, he was thinking of a rather basic idea, flooding. In some of the memories he had gotten from Magnus there were things called swamps which were basically big fields or forests that were flooded with water. The only problem he could see here was that his creatures might not have that easy of a time navigating the floor either. None of his monsters were exactly aquatic and he didn’t want to make a floor that would come back and bite him in the tail later.

Still, he wanted to give it a try, he would make some shallower sections and land paths for his creatures and clever invaders to follow. Hopefully, that would keep all of his creatures viable in this new environment. The core glanced over at his assistant and sighed, Magnus was once again asleep, seriously what was going on with the drake? He didn’t really like sleeping at all so he couldn't fathom why the drake was constantly taking naps.

Grumbling Valens turned back to his floor, making a basic swamp was relatively straightforward, he was just going to flood the entire place with water. It might not be the most elegant solution but once he had all the water there he could work on adding plants and paths to the floor.

It took him a long time to flood the twelfth floor, so long he had almost given up on the idea a few times. However he persevered and after a monotonous four hours of doing nothing but creating water, he was finished. He now had an entire floor filled with muddy water, and nothing else. Valens sighed to himself, it didn’t look like much yet but some plants would spruce things up nicely.

Valens created a few grass seeds on an exposed hill and a small tree nearby in the shallows. The grass started growing just fine but something was wrong with the tree, taking a look at the wilting sapling the core found that it had too much water? He checked again and sure enough, the tree was oversaturated with water and dying right before his eyes. This was a problem, he liked trees and he could plant them exclusively on the few dry areas on the floor that wasn’t going to do.

Trees let his creatures hide and fight in different ways, and as he had seen with the humans they helped make some great ambush situations. Forgoing trees was not an option for the core at this point and he racked his brains trying to come up with a solution. He could drain some of the water out of his swamp but draining enough of it to matter would turn his floor into a slightly damp forest and not a swamp and he didn’t want that either.

Magnus was always playing around with different kinds of mana, so maybe just throwing mana at the problem would fix things? Come to think of it, all of the mana the drake used always looked rather similar to the core, he could only distinguish them through the visual colors some of them made. Maybe he just wasn’t strong enough yet to be able to sense different mana types with his aura?

Anway getting off track a little bit, Valens absorbed the dead tree and created a new one, but this time he continued to pump more and more mana into the sapling. The tree began growing incredibly fast even compared to the normal plant growth of the dungeon which was saying something. Valens also watched with interest as the structure of the tree warped and adapted to its new surroundings. Its roots grew thick and long pushing the trunk out from the water, and the tree stopped growing at a much shorter height than most of his trees.

Taking a second look at the tree Valens blinked, even its pattern had been altered, he bet this was a completely different species of tree, but the system wasn’t being very helpful with this or plants in general. All of the tree patterns he had gotten were just called trees, which was very unhelpful when he was trying to figure out what the plant was. The plant kind of looked like a mangrove tree but he really wasn’t sure what it was. He could wake up Magnus and ask him but he could also try experimenting with mana infusion instead.

Very quickly the core decided that playing or experimenting with his mana was a much more important task than figuring out the specifics of his tree. Not like it really mattered what kind of plant it was, it survived in the water so it was a success. Valen managed to get grass to adapt to the water as well, the plant grew much taller and thinner. Bushes were a bit of a disappointment; they turned into what was basically a smaller version of the mangrove trees.

That was fine though the core moved on to his creatures, in the past he had tried infusing extra mana into the patterns of things as he created them but that hadn’t worked maybe if he tried with an existing creature? Finding a small snake slithering through the marshy floor, Valens poured mana into the creature in fascination as it grew almost a foot. Exciting the core added even more mana to the creature excited to see what would happen, which was a messy explosion of gore as the snake blew apart.

Valens scratched his nonexistent head in confusion, it had been working at first the snake had grown some, but why did it explode in the end? The core tried infusing mana into a few more creatures and quickly discovered a pattern, the age of the creature mattered. When one of his monsters was full-grown, infusing them with mana would cause them to explode, but any creature that was not yet full-grown would absorb the mana until they finished growing.

It made a little more sense why the plants were much more receptive to the mana infusion than the animals, plants for the most part just kept growing as long as they were alive. Valens tried out infusing various creatures stopping just short of when they would explode, compared to the plants, though the results were lackluster.

The animals did change according to their surroundings but it wasn’t nearly as dramatic of a change as the plants, he didn’t even get a new pattern from it. In the swamp the snakes got a little bit better at swimming he thought at least, the lizards developed some slight webbing between their toes, and that was about it as far as major changes went. His other creatures just didn’t change that much, the insects were taking to the swamp with relish bussing around everywhere, while the mice and rabbits were making do in the small patches of land around the swamp.

The wolves however were not doing so great, they stuck to the land mostly as well but they were having a rough time coping with the swamp. They weren’t terrible at swimming but they weren’t that good either, the lizards and snakes were noticeably better and any wolf caught in open water with them was pretty much a goner. The goblins were doing fine as always, even though they were worse swimmers than the wolves. The hobgoblins had even figured out how to use logs as very crude boats, honestly whenever Valens thought he had an idea of how dumb the goblin were they went and surprised him. The core watched a pair of goblins launch out on an improvised tree branch boat, that being said they were still pretty dumb, as the tree branch sank under the weight of the four goblins.

Silas yawned widely, this was getting very old, in the end, the adventurers had returned from the dungeon which was all well and good, but now he had to sit down and interview each of them separately. There was some protocol about adventurers not collaborating on a story, which frankly Silas could have done without. The dungeon had seemed fine, better than fine it had seemed like an almost ideal training ground.

The seemingly endless number of mobs throughout the dungeon would be a massive boon to new delvers, and the lack of a straightforward path would be a good thing in the long run. If a group ran into something they weren’t comfortable facing they could always turn around and find a different way forward. The only issue was the loot or lack thereof. The adventurers had found absolutely no loot or treasure of any kind until they had gotten to the bosses who always dropped something when they were in their rooms.

That wasn’t good, dungeons usually made quite a bit of money charging entrance fees, but if there was no loot people would be much less inclined to come to this specific dungeon. They could sell monster parts and meat, but low-level monster parts were rather common so they weren’t going to make much off of those. The old mage sighed, hopefully, the dungeon would eventually grow high mana plants, those would be worth delving for and rather unusual for a dungeon to have. Unfortunately, it would be a while before any such plants grew, the reason they were valuable was that they didn’t grow in the kingdoms unusually, they needed denser and stronger mana.

There was a sharp knock on the tent pole and then Kira strolled in. “Well I didn’t think you had it in you old man but good job on all these interviews. This is the last one.” Silas sank into his chair relieved that his ordeal was almost over. “After we finish up here though, it's time to talk to the city planners about the town and future city.”

Silas sat bolt upright with indignation, practically bouncing out of his chair. “Why do we have to plan out the city? Isn’t that supposed to be the job of the noble who takes over the dungeon?” He really wished House Storm would hurry up and pick someone to control the dungeon already, he was getting sick and tired of all this work.

“That’s incorrect, we can’t name the city yet because we’re not nobles. We are however allowed to start building up the future city, and we got a letter from Lord Mathias Storm. He intends for you to be in charge for a while longer.” Silas groaned in distress, if lord Storm was ordering him to stay put for a while then he was going to have to stay put and actually put in the effort to run the fledgling dungeon city for a while. House Storm wasn’t so bad as far as noble houses went, they were fair and downright benevolent compared to most nobles, but he still felt a bit annoyed at the monumental amount of work being hoisted on him. One did not just ignore direct orders from a duke though even once a noble took over this dungeon and became a lord they would still have to take orders from the Ducal House Storm. He had even heard rumors that the house was close to applying for royalty status but nothing had come of it so far.

“Fine, fine we’ll meet the city planners and do this whole thing properly. Who’s the last person I need to interview by the way?” He hoped he could make this quick especially if he had other stuff to do afterward.

“It's that young mage we talked about before.” Kira gave him a meaningful look, and Silas sighed, he was doing a lot of that today. It had been a long time since he had taken an apprentice and to be frank, the last one hadn’t turned out so great, getting himself killed in a pointless war. Kira could technically be considered his student but she didn’t really need his help that much, just advice and demonstrations on the various basic elements. The girl was frankly a genius at mana manipulation and compounding elements.

It might be nice to have someone to teach after all this time, and he had a bit of a soft spot for commoners idiotic enough to choose the mage class. It took a special kind of ignorant or stupid to take that class with no teacher around. “Alright Kira, send him in.”