It’s been roughly seven years since she freed herself of her captors and her dungeon was coming along nicely if she could say so herself. With the 3rd floor finally completed she just now had enough processing power available to her to start creating basic materials. She still had a long way to go for anything fancy, but she could finally start really constructing stuff instead of simple excavations.

So far only her 1st floor was truly populated as she was able to include several skylights to enable plants to grow on her floors and provide the foodstuffs needed for many of her first-floor grazers. These were mostly beasts normally found in a valley as she is now located in. The second floor, larger than the top floor, was often used by beasts that had absorbed all the energy they could from the concentrations on the first floor and desired higher energy densities. However, her lack of lighting and environmentally friendly conditions to the beasts on this floor led to most beasts only coming down every so often while most stayed up top.

The only difference to this were predators that did the exact opposite. Both a pair of wolves as well as a bobcat had claimed a territory at opposite ends of the second floor and only ventured up to hunt while retreating to the second floor to rest and breed. Beasts venturing down from the first level always had to content with these predators and soon had to find ways to fight off these predators with strengthened horns or faster speeds and reflexes.

She had started off growing only horizontally, existing only as a first floor with several open caverns, basically now open topped bowls with bridges spanning over them and a small ramp going down into each from the surface level. However as she soon noticed, this strategy would not work in perpetuity, as the contact with the air carried away and disrupted her energy dispersal too fast that at a certain point she could not reach further out and a hard limit on her expansion on the surface was reached.

In order to guide her energy flows she had to burrow down and create a second floor, so that energy could completely spread through her second floor before the pressure pushed it up and into her surface levels where the air currents would carry it away before she could claim too much area. Increasing the total flow would increase that area, but the increases gained from that could not make up for the upkeep of keeping a higher flow going. In that way dimensional energy behaved very similar to a gaseous substance through its interaction with the surrounding matter.

There were no such limitations for the second floor, however after a while, she started to notice, that no matter how much she increased the area of her second floor, the concentration of energy would always remain the same before drifting off to the first floor and thus the environment, either through the corridors to the first floor or diffusion through the matter separating the two floors.

Digging further down however solved this problem as it enabled a basic pressure layering of the energy densities in her construction, increasing the available energies beasts and other entities could absorb the further down they went. The increase in pressure was of course dependent on her being able to further increase the flow of mana through her dimension tap.

Her third floor however was now so far removed from the surface, that except from certain bugs, no other animal had made this floor it’s home yet. With the exception of some of the stronger predators from above no other beast even ventured that far down yet, and even they only ever came for a small session to absorb more energy, giving her a larger amount of structured energy to work with, before returning to their lairs on the second floor.

With regards to her plans, she just resigned herself to have her first floors be basically a nature preserve and only once invaders ventured further down to start with the actual challenges to start the training and evaluation of her prospective allies.

But now that she could finally assemble energy into matter, she would be able to construct simple atomic lattice structures such as the simpler metals and rocks.

Though the rocks would all have to be of the same material and could not be any of the conglomerates that were commonly found in the earth. What she was really hoping to accomplish however, was a simple diode structure to emit light further down to hopefully entice some of the more simple plants to grow down in her lower levels, even without a full hydroponic lamp to provide a simulation of the light given off by the sun.

Experimentation however soon led to one horrifying result. Electricity behaved completely different to what she was used to! When she induced a potential difference at the diode, instead of a flow of electrons as she expected, the subatomic particles bound to everything around her reacted and instead of a smooth white glow, her diode exploded on her third floor, scaring most of the animals above.

Well Shit. She started to despair, kicking the base of the holotank in front of her. If basic electronic technology doesn’t work anymore, the whole technology tree I have access to is useless!

Her whole plan of uplifting humanity back to a technological civilization was in danger if the most basic of technological wonders she planned on introducing in the beginning, already wouldn’t work anymore.

Her muted panic and depression started to rise again, though this time she didn’t fall back to her apathic self after her capture, as something else was tickling her in the back of her mind. She sat down in her virtual control room to meditate on it, when it hit her!

There are other dungeons out there, some with more than 1000 floors! There must be another way!

Diving back into the information provided to her she soon discovered that they could construct a simple lattice material out of subatomic particles, similar in structure to basic metals, into an element that couldn’t have existed before the fall, and thus she had no knowledge of.

Running any type of mana through this structure would cause it to glow slightly giving off a slight amount of primordial mana with an addition of warmth. Basically, what this could do was replace standard hydroponic lamps used in warships to help plants grow.

Further advances by other cores detailed more complex variations of it that she didn’t have the processing power to create or modify yet that would give off an additional modulation of mana that would accelerate the growth of beasts as well, instead of being limited to plants. Additional modifications could even achieve other effects that were so far out of her reach right now she didn’t even bother to investigate them further.

With her original plans overthrown once again, she for now decided to mostly copy off of what other cores had discovered, though digging into the background of the manalights showed her, that the other cores actually hadn’t discovered these manalights themselves, but copied them off of devices brought into their domain by invaders.

Finally accepting the knowledge given to her by that first contact with another core, she for the first time dug into the information provided to her with the intention of actually cataloguing everything this time instead of just skimming it for a solution to an acute problem.

Hmm, I actually can control beasts once they absorbed enough of my primordial mana, instead of just influencing their instincts as I had done so far. Though the first time this should be possible is when the beasts reach the entrance to the corridor leading to fifth floor as anything above that wouldn’t have the concentrations in the ambient air required for beasts to absorb enough for me to have enough influence over.

Once I do reach that level, I could assign a subroutine for control of these beasts to behave in any way I desire. Sweet! I can basically make boss mobs that I can control on the exit of the fifth floor to ensure only strong enough invaders can get to my training areas, which I can then design in the exact way I want, including behavior patterns and more!

Though yeah, I am still stuck on 3 floors so far… Better get back to building now that I know how to make the lower floors habitable to more than just bugs and fungi.

Knowing how to proceed she started to construct several manalights around her second floor, keeping some areas dark while lighting up others enough to resemble the surface biomes above. Assigning a single subroutine to keep the lights running in a day/night cycle similar to above she tried to entice the beasts living above to venture further down whenever possible, carrying seeds and other matter into her second and third floor to jumpstart the growth of fauna needed for most beasts to survive on that floor on a permanent basis.

Constructing the Craters for her beasts on the surface she originally made sure to keep the flow of the river she discovered close by the same. Though with the need for moisture in her lower floors she decided to siphon off a bit of the river, at least until she could create her own water.

What she could already do was create H atoms from mana. Though using her mana to create a hydrolysis process was such an enormous waste of mana that she would have to sacrifice several hundred processes just to have enough energy to keep a trickle of water running. This might change later when she could create water directly or her income increased in such a manner that several hundred processes wasn’t as huge a chunk of processing power as now.

She repeated a similar arrangement on her third floor however instead of many but smaller caverns connected by single corridors, she kept this floor more open. Creating several connecting corridors to fewer but larger caverns, with many pathways for beasts to take. Some of the caverns on this floor were up to a kilometer wide on each side now that she had structurally stronger materials to work with than the pre-existing earth. She hoped to this way ensure some animals could always run away and survive once invaders started to appear. According to experience provided to her, invaders usually wouldn’t spend too much time hunting down underdeveloped beasts anyway, so this should suffice.

Having finished setting up the basic necessities for life in her subterranean palace, all that was left to do was wait for life to start settling into her newer deeper ecosystems, while she had a whole new branch of technological research to start with most scientific revelations of her time now proven useless.

But if history taught her anything, it would be long and arduous journey to discover anything worthwhile with only her main mind being capable of truly innovative thinking. With many tasks that would occupy her mind it could be many centuries until she was ready again to start reproducing some of the more basic technological novelties known in her history files, though who knew, she might discover some whole new applications with the possibilities of magic being a real thing in this new age she found herself in.