Panic ripped through Gem’s crystalline prison. Chesu was gone. He couldn’t feel the presence of the wisp anymore through their connection, but if he concentrated real hard, he could see that there was still a connection. That the wisp was still alive somewhere.

Not gone.

Just not here.

A thousand questions flooded Gem’s mind. Where had he gone? Why had he left? How was Gem supposed to know how to build his dungeon now?

But that last one struck a nerve.

He knew what he needed to do, wisp or no wisp.

The World Core was in trouble. Gem needed to build a dungeon for adventurers to run so he could earn experience so he could help fight off the Ostrum. There were more details that needed to be sorted, but Gem could start on that first part alone.

Maybe by the time he finished, Chesu would return.

You have been offered a limited time quest: Build Your First Floor. A floor consists of more than two connected rooms, with at least one of them attached to your Core Room. It needs an entrance and one of your rooms must contain a Boss Mob, which is like a regular Mob but with a Boss Heart. You can make a Boss Heart by combining five Mob Hearts. Be sure to spend all of your command points! And don’t worry—he’ll be back soon.

Gem wished he could send the system a picture of a frowning gem, like he would Chesu. He felt the urge to frown so deep within his gem that it made him rattle in his looping metal pedestal.

The urge to keep busy soon followed and Gem took his place at the generator. It was mindless work, something he could do while thinking.

After a moment he flipped open his quest log to look at the details.

Five Mob Hearts. It seemed like a steep cost. If Chesu were here, Gem would have asked for details. It was easy to assume that a Boss Mob would be stronger. Did that mean it required more command points? How many was enough to put aside?

There were no answers. Instead, a thin vine of frustration wound itself around Gem, turning tighter and tighter. If he had lungs, he would have panicked. Or screamed.

I need a distraction, Gem thought to himself. My mind cannot be trusted to function when given space to roam.

The generator had been a decent idea. If he could have just let his mind wander, standing at the generator was the most productive thing he could have done. But there was too much space, too many places for his thoughts to go.

The Plantling looked up at him and shrieked, which Gem took to mean it understood.

At least he could communicate when he was leaving.

Unlike certain wisps.

Gem went to the far side of his island. While he had originally replaced the dirt of his island with cobblestone in an attempt to build it up, there wasn’t enough space for three large rooms. Not with the endless lava and water pits, the six generators, the tree, his Core Room… Gem needed more room to build.

Thankfully he had the whole sky at his disposal.

He started by building a wall down.

Chesu had explained y-levels as the space above and below. That didn’t feel quite right to Gem, but he couldn't explain why. Instead of arguing with Sleyn’s mysterious world design he focused on placing blocks down.

Building down was smart for two reasons, despite Chesu’s warning about going down to the surface early. The first was that it allowed him to keep his Core Room safer. The Ostrum could apparently fly, and Chesu was sure that would be a problem. The Plantlings working at their generators gave Gem an early warning system. Right now, his Core Room was exposed to the outside on one length of wall because he couldn’t close it. An Ostrum could come flying in and harass him without a moment’s hesitation.

But if his dungeon were below him, it would mean the Ostrum would need to travel his entire dungeon to get to his Core Room, and even then Gem would be able to make it very difficult to get from his dungeon entrance to his core.

Additionally, it let Gem build with impunity.

Had he started with his island as the base of his dungeon, he would have felt restricted in its design. By using the island as a ceiling, he felt freer to build whatever he desired. The build could be the exact same, in the end. There was no real way of knowing. But he felt freer, and so he decided to continue to run with the idea.

It wasn’t like he could even see the surface of Sleyn below him. He had plenty of room to build before it became a problem.

Deep within his core, Gem wanted to build a massive dungeon. Something that would strike fear and awe into the hearts of adventurers who roamed its halls. But he was limited by two things: resources and time. If he spent ages building and perfecting his dungeon, the World Core would be compromised and Sleyn would be no more.

But that didn’t mean he had to sacrifice aesthetics.

A vision came to Gem.

Tall, crumbling walls. Open spaces filled with trees that fought one another for access to the light that spilled in through large windows. An ethereal song, dancing delicately on the somehow impossible wind that coursed through its corridors and rooms.

He wasn’t sure if this was a place he had once been.

But it was a place he could absolutely create, given enough time.

For the time being, Gem built his dungeon out of cobblestone blocks. It didn’t quite match the crumbling vision in his mind, but he would replace the blocks as more resources became available.

When he finished one wall that was ten y-levels tall and ten x-levels long, Gem realized he hated what he created. The same texture over and over looked fake in a way it logically shouldn’t. But instead of rethinking his entire design, Gem removed random blocks from the wall and replaced them with either cut stone or mossy cut stone. There was no rhyme or reason to where he placed the blocks, and when he pulled his vision back to look at the wall again, he realized that was the right call.

Seeing the blocks independent of one another, no one would think cobblestone and mossy cut stone would look natural sitting side-by-side. One was a conglomeration of small and large chunks of stone compressed within a block and then squared off. It was organic and a bit chaotic. The other was a smooth brick of right angles and straight lines, decorated almost thoughtlessly with bits of pale green moss that laid flatly against the sides. But something about Sleyn made it work. The placed blocks blended edges to blur the different textures, making the wall flow from rounded stones to angled bricks in a way that looked natural.

Revitalized by his design working out, Gem continued building.

The floor was made entirely out of cobblestone, since he planned on replacing some amount of it with dirt for trees and cut stone to create a path. He made it twenty blocks wide, which seemed extravagant, but it was a cost Gem could afford. From that he built three more walls, being sure to not close the box completely so that he could still work inside it.

Once the basic room was done, Gem worked on the design a bit more.

Like his erratic placement of bricks to give the wall texture, he built out randomly selected parts of the wall, giving the room itself more depth by creating just a few recesses and breaking up the monotony of just four static, straight walls.

It came together perfectly.

Gem sat in awe, looking at the room he’d built. While it obviously still needed the forest and other key parts, it looked close enough to his vision that he felt his core grow cold.

I love it, he thought with reverence. But this is only one room. I’ve got two more to make.