Allison felt conflicted. On the one hand she was elated that she finally felt a connection to Lynx forming. She could now give her direct orders instead of only messing with her instincts. She couldn’t take control as if Lynx were a robot, it was more like in the form of, Hide there, sneak there, scratch that, etc.

On the other hand, watching the development intently over the last 4 weeks gave her exactly nil. She could tell what happened, she could even see how the energy was used to initiate and nudge the growth in the right direction, including the additional mana conduits to the whiskers. All this knowledge would allow her to initiate a similar process with other bobcats if she so desired, however she still knew nothing more of why the application of mana in this exact manner would cause the effects she just witnessed.

While it enhanced her new knowledge library, it did nothing to enhance her understanding of mana physics, which only helped show her how far she still had to go to build a basis from which to start science again.

Resolving herself to wait for more input that could help enlighten her, she returned her attention to the holo with her dungeon displayed in its entirety.

At the moment it resembled the cut off base of a cone. With each lower floor a bit larger than the one above, while the surface area was by far the smallest. It was by no means small just smaller than her biomes below the surface.

She had removed the separating walls of the surface structures, so that it now looked like the crater of a long extinct volcano with a multitude of bridges spanning the crater, connected to pillars reaching some 50 meters into the sky. The river she tried to keep the same, flowing across an aqueduct crossing the middle of her crater.

The center of the crater formed a small shallow pond, no more than 2 or 3 meters deep, fed by the siphon she created from the river. It flowed around one side of her central pillar with some of it flowing down along it into the pond that served as a watering hole for all the animals making her crater their home.

While some fishes had made the pond their home, only few so far had found their way down the small flow that fed the river of her second floor.

All over the edge of the crater and the base of the pillars, caverns could be found. While some were the homes of all kinds of beasts, others were well lit corridors that led further down to the deeper levels of her dungeon.

The caverns of the second floor kept the biome from wherever they descended from. Some ended up in narrow rocky cliffs, optimal for climbers, while other were completely covered in forests or grasslands only. Each Beast tended to stay in its preferred habitat not mixing too much, but it just seemed too much trouble, which is why her third floor combined each biome into several larger caverns with mixed habitats in each.

The 4th floor continued this philosophy with 4 large caverns with only the 5th one actually being combined into a single large cavern with enough height in it for birds to mix properly with other animals.

Enough beasts now populated her 5th floor that she had enough mana flowing into her core, that she could finally dedicate the processes required to modify materials without having to rely on deconstruction and construction to alter the surfaces of her materials. This allowed for the modification of existing materials into complex structures that she didn’t have the processing power to create yet.

In addition to the newly available materials to her, she could now finally open and close passages between the floors at will. Allowing new beasts to descend further without having to pass through the goat pillars or the nesting ground of Lynx as invaders would have to.

One of the newly available materials to her were the growth variants of manalights, which only required a slight alteration of its superstructure to modulate some of the mana given off.

Reaching into the holotank with her mind, she started to plan for the 6th floor, finally dedicating a path, invaders would have to fight through, while maintaining separate breeding grounds for beasts to keep growing in. The Path for invaders would be outright tiny when compared with her 5th floor, however most of the 6th floor would be occupied by her breeding grounds.

The breeding grounds she separated into 2 kinds, the ones dedicated to feeding her challenge rooms and the ones dedicated to the development of the beasts themselves. The former kind not having any danger to her beasts, while the latter kept to her method of intermingling the species, hoping to spur further development for her deeper floors.

With the growthlights she would be able to ensure a constant surplus of beasts to throw at invaders, while at the same time enabling a lot denser population of predators to prey in her challenge biomes. Lost in a creative trance she lost any sense of time, only to be abruptly shook out of it by a whiff of energy flowing into her from the edge of her territory she hadn’t tasted in a while.

***

Horace kept roaming around his party of 8, scouting ahead and around them to make sure they wouldn’t be surprised by any roaming beasts that might have descended from the mana rich valleys further up in the mountains. So far everything seemed to be in order though for a while now he could catch whiffs of primordial mana surging his way.

To his best knowledge no dungeon was located so far out in the wilderness and the magitech guilds hadn’t reported any new dungeon forming in this area either. It confused him to no end, as primordial mana should normally only come from dungeons, as no beast he knew so far developed the ability to directly produce primordial mana.

God-Emperor Francis was the only human in recent history that had been known to somehow possess a method of producing primordial mana himself. His method was never discovered and since his disappearance roughly a decade ago, it seemed unlikely anyone ever would.

For the last two decades his team had been first fighting the armies of the God-Emperor, and after the collapse of his empire with his disappearance, helping with the cleanup around the ravaged countryside.

Currently he and his team were escorting a pair of prospectors into the countryside in search of new mineral deposits. The rebuilding efforts consumed a prodigious amount of resources as so much was lost or destroyed during the years of fighting.

With the Alliance splitting up the remaining territories, an air of opportunity and hope spread throughout the lands that belonged to the Empire before. The pair that Horace was escorting belonged to a conglomerate of earth mages, that owned huge tracts of lands throughout the kingdoms that made up the alliance.

With many opportunists flocking to the newly acquired lands they were looking to expand their holdings and sent out several prospecting teams to find resources for their ever expanding business back in the alliance. Should the happen upon a previously undiscovered vein of iron or other useful materials, they would send word back and start constructing an outpost for miners to start mining the precious metals.

Another whiff of refreshing primordial mana pulled Horace back to the present and out of his musings. It’s close, I can almost tell the direction it’s coming from! He thought excitedly trying to discern more from the short gust that blew the fresh taste of mana into his face.

Following the general direction of the wind he felt these snippets of mana with increasing frequency, until he took another step and suddenly stood frozen with one foot in the air.

There’s definitely a dungeon here! He was sure of it now. This density and purity could come from nothing else, and the beginning of the dungeon should only be another couple hundred meters ahead. The frequency with which the fragments pure mana got blown into his face could leave no doubt about the proximity of a dungeon now.

He did not dare get any closer by himself, so he quickly made his way back to where the main body of his party made their way through the wilderness to discuss this opportunity with them. They weren’t that far out into the wilderness yet to be completely inaccessible, and if there really was a dungeon out here, there would definitely soon be more here than a mere mining outpost.

He broke through the underbrush with an excited look on his face breaking out as soon as he saw his friends turning their faces towards him.

“What is it Horace? Spot an exposed vein of mithril?” Fabian, His oldest friend and longtime adventuring partner, jokingly called out to him upon seeing his expression.

“Better my friend!” Horace could barely keep his excitement contained “I was just scouting around when I caught it in the air!”

The rest of his party started to crowd around him looking at him expectantly.

“Well then, spit it out!” Mia finally prompted him when he just kept smiling at them.

“It’s a dungeon! There is no mistaking it, there is a dungeon out here producing primordial mana. I followed the scent and I’m sure of it. Just a couple hundred meters further that way, and we should reach the edges of it’s domain!”

“You sure about that?!” Brian the elder of the 2 earth mages pushed his way through Horace’s companions to confirm what he just heard.

“That is indeed good news then. We should make haste and head over there immediately! Once I can confirm it myself we have to send out the message to headquarters and start construction immediately!”

If there really was a dungeon there, Horace new that the conglomerate would pay handsomely for the discovery, as per their contract they had with them, they could earn a finders fee depending on the richness of the vein they found. And a dungeon would be a very rich find indeed.

Ignoring the excited questions around him, he continued to bask in the general excitement around him for a moment longer before turning to direction he just came from and leading his friends and employers to that spot where he first caught the scent of the dungeon.

He just hoped he was really right, as friends or no, if he was wrong they would rip him to pieces if he was wrong.

***

Even Brian was not immune to the excitement brewing around him, even though he already had more than 150 years of experience with the conglomerate. Mages were hard to come by, especially as old ones as he was, though from looking at him one could be forgiven to thin him no more than 50 years old. Most people preferred to cultivate the physical side of mana applications compared to the mage path.

Should there be a new dungeon he might finally decide to settle down once he and his partner constructed the outpost. A new dungeon always entailed a lot of work, but they were usually not as hard or deadly as more established ones. Who knows it might even help him break through to Stage 8 if the difficulty on the deeper floors was not too much as in most other more established dungeons.

Following the scout, he and his partner made their way to the indicated location of the new dungeon. It wasn’t long until he could taste the same primordial mana in the air that tipped their scout off in the first place. It wasn’t long until he and his companions made their way to what was clearly the edge of a dungeon.

When the people in front of him suddenly stopped to stare he scoffed at them and pushed his way through, only to himself be stopped speechless. In front of him stretched a huge crater, with the other side barely visible through the multitude of bridges spanning the crater in some form of bizarre arrangement.

Standing at the edge of the crater they could hear the cries of a multitude of animals going about their business in the forest filling the crater below them. The primordial mana clearly came from this crater, shooting up along the side of the cliff to spill into the air and be carried away by the wind.

He was so fascinated by the sights directly below him, that he completely missed a whole river flowing across on one of the bridges spanning the crater. Who would do such a thing! A river on a bridge, by Rivalts beard, now I’ve seen it all! Most dungeons he’d visited before had a single entrance below, never before had he seen one building on the surface since the legends of origin.

Shaking his head he turned to his companions who still stood frozen by the spectacle in front of him. Clapping his hand to shake them out of the stupor he called out to them!

“That settles it then! There definitely is a dungeon here! Marc get the message to headquarters immediately. Horace, Fabian, Mia, Illia, Patrick, Lomar, Luke lets get to it. We have an outpost to build!”