Chapter 18 - Finally the story is picking up speed

Currently the atmosphere is rather awkward, actually, I think we leveled up to a tense atmosphere now. Penny fell asleep on a dryad, seemingly oblivious to the hostility, Goblin is in a corner brewing potions and I'm pretending to do something important.

How did it reach this point? Well, after Goblin was done yelling at me, he left and came back after 3 days, looking pale, his skeletal body covered in scratches. He was dragging a huge bag full of herbs, apothecary tools, equipment, and various other trinkets. I have no idea where he found so much stuff but I'm not really complaining. After I checked the bags thoroughly for any dark ingredients I absorbed all of it and got a few new items I can make.

I learned from Penny that there are some restrictions on my absorption ability on unlocking things, for living beings, the creature or plant has to die in my dungeon and be a rank below me. Non-living things like equipment and items are a bit easier, I only have to be in the same rank as the item I absorb, which is apparently dependant on the one who crafted it.

I unlocked a bunch of stuff, some cheap jewelry, leather gear, bronze coins, iron swords and axes, a set of basic apothecary stuff and a bunch of plants, all of them seem to only serve a purpose as ingredients though and the mana in them is nowhere near the seizure set that Goblin gave me the first day he was here. Getting all this stuff gave me the weird title of The guy who takes one man's trash another man's treasure too seriously.

What the hell is with titles in this world? At this rate, my status screen is going to be more useless titles than actual status.

Well, titles aside after absorbing the mana crystal that Grey gave me and factoring in my natural mana regeneration I am sitting on about 1500 pure mana and an excess of 3500 unconverted mana. If I convert all my pure mana into DP I'll have 150 DP, which is enough for an Ant Hive Queen and some more stuff along with it. After some consultation with Penny, I learned that the Ant Queen I have will take a day to birth the first batch of worker ants, after which it'll steadily grow its colony.

An unending arming of ants sounds nice but they are only strong if there's a lot of them, like enough to drown people a lot. It would take about a month to get a colony that large. But it seems I'm in a relatively isolated area so I guess I can afford that wait.

I already took Mushroom People and Bosses from before and given my mana levels I'll be able to get a boss rank monster pretty easily, I'll hold off until I get an interesting evolution or variant since bosses rarely evolve and I don't want something bland as my first boss. Of course, if you have a named boss then things are different since names boost evolution and can offset the restrictions given by being a boss monster.

Mushroom people are 5 DP each, they have lower overall physical stats than goblins but their intelligence is 9, smarter than anything I can currently summon, they are about as smart as a 6 year old child, if I spent more time I could probably teach them to talk but I can't be bothered right now. And since 9 is the first bottleneck I don't see them getting 10 intelligence anytime soon.

They only have one racial ability, Spore Explosion. Just as the name suggests, they can explode and release a bunch of spores, killing themselves in the process. I don't know what you were expecting but it's literally just an explosion of spores. The spores don't do much but if they absorb a bit of mana then they can grow up to be Mushroom People. However, I tested it once and the mana requirement is about double what it is if I used DP and only 5 were spawned. The only good thing is that I didn't need my Purified Mana to grow these Mushroom People so I can get more Mushroom People at a faster rate if I spent a bit more.

Yup you heard that right I've been doing stuff during those three days Goblin was gone. Afterall my generation could barely stay a full minute away from a phone, you think I could spend three days doing nothing?

Well, I didn't do much because my main focus was the mana crystal which had almost a thousand purified mana in it. I could make mana crystals but the quality is so much worse, it's like comparing a diamond to a handful of loose sand. The mana crystal Grey got me is just so much denser with mana than anything I could make. The only thing that could compete with it is my core which has gone from tennis ball sized to a soccer ball during the week I've been here.

Well, let's get back on track, I've discovered that by pumping mana into a living being they become larger, some would get Larger or Greater in their species name. I didn't try it on my Lesser Dryads since apparently their evolution condition is getting basic nature magic and mimicking a more humanoid form. Right now they just look like a bunch of vines that grew out of the ground and were woven together into a humanoid shape. And I'm pretty sure making them larger would just impede their evolution to full dryads. I couldn't teach them the Blood Rose magic I got off the lottery since they need to at least have mid-level nature magic to even attempt the spell.

I've also widened the corridor leading up to the first room using Edit. Making it large enough for two people to comfortably walk next to each other. Edit allows me to move things around at the cost of some mana. I can use edit to create a sort of tool using mana, I used that function to shape mana into something like a shovel to widen the corridor. However, I can't use Edit on my monsters other than to move them. Since they would die if I tried to edit their biology because I would have to cut them into pieces to do that so that removes the option of creating unique monsters right now.

I also made an extra room next to the dryad room to carry out the experiments I mentioned before.

I've been intentionally holding out on spending the rest of my mana for the simple reason that I wanted to finish absorbing the mana crystal and splurge it all at once. Since Penny says I'm relatively isolated, I thought it won't hurt if I did as such. Apparently, I'm inside of a large mountain which is also in the middle of a large jungle which explains why all the mana I've been absorbing is green and why I got Lesser Dryads and wildlife options for my selections.

Well, it's time to get down to business. I didn't wait all this time for nothing. I converted all my pure mana into DP and I began working. Right now my dungeon was too simple being just a straight line. I moved those corridors cutting it in half and having on half branched to the left from the entrance, I created a room at a right turn and had three Mushroom people move into it along with two Lesser Dryad and lit it completely using the glowing fungi, costing me exactly 8 DP. Using the remaining half of corridors I place it so it created a U shape, with the room being the middle part at the bottom. I moved my first dryad room which now only had 4 Lesser Dryads left and connected it to the other end of the U. Moving the experiments room, which is currently filled with a bunch of Greater and Larger variants of random herbs.

Now I made a large room by creating 4 rooms and knocking down the walls, unlocking a new feature allowing me to increase the size of rooms I make. I filled the last room with the mushrooms of Corrosion, Rot, and Death. Filling them up with enough mana to change them to the Large and Greater variants.

I had the last Mushroom Person go there and had him activate Spore Explosion, releasing spores into that room. This is my first attempt at evolution. From the Blood Rose Spellbook I got off the Lottery, I learned that they created this evolution of Blood Rose by exposing a normal rose, to extremely dry conditions and different types of mana, occasionally throwing the fresh corpse of a dead animal at it. This was done over the course of its lifetime. The survivors of this experiment were used in selective breeding until they got the Blood Rose they use for this spell.

Right now I could only reliably imitate one of those conditions, which is exposing it to elemental mana. Thankfully, it seems like I can't taste these shrooms if I didn't absorb it into my core. By growing these shrooms bigger, they will emit small amounts of dark mana which would hopefully allow the Mushroom People spores to grow into variants that have the Dark Element. I chose Dark Mana because they spread VERY quickly, I have already experienced it first hand how quickly they can spread and just generally corrupt other types of mana. Even though these dark element mushrooms are the Larger variety, the amount of mana they emit is very small, in fact, most of their mana is contained in the actual mushroom. So hopefully they won't emit so much dark mana that they actually kill the spores. The dark mushroom room took 30 DP.

The whole renovation took me 38 DP, leaving me with 122 DP left.

It's obvious what I'm going to buy now. Investing 100 DP, I summon an Ant Hive Queen and place her in the experiment room filled with various large herbs. I allowed her to eat any of the herbs if she wants to. Maybe it'll create some variant types but I don't want to actively experiment with Hive Queens given how expensive they are. If they get an evolution then so be it. But I seriously don't want her to die because I was doing an experiment.

Seeing that I still have some DP left, I summon four more Mushroom People and place them in the Dark Mushroom Room. I got two of them to use Spore Explosion and had the remaining two to guard the room. I used the rest to summon two Lesser Slimes and placed them in the first room.

If I didn't buy the Queen I could probably make a more complex dungeon, but it's better to make summon one as soon as possible so it can set up a colony asap. The problem isn't mana, it's the fact that I can only use purified mana, which is annoying as hell. Given how slow my purification ability is compared to my mana absorption rate. I can slowly increase my ability to purify if I concentrate on purifying mana, but doing it is akin to watching paint dry.

Right now I'm watching the Ant Queen making a small burrow off to the side of the room. I could watch it for an entire day until it spawns its first brood, but I should definitely try to increase my purification ability. But it's soooo boring!

(Another Perspective)

(3rd Person because I was too lazy)

An adventurer party is currently treading through a dense jungle. They're on a regular subjugation quest for goblins. Every so often a guild will send a Silver Ranked party to clear the jungle of goblins, to prevent large tribes from springing up. However, they have yet to spot a single goblin, despite being in the jungle for two days already.

Today they sighted a primitive looking village. They cautiously neared the village. The area felt unnatural for some reason. They neared the center of the village, then, they saw it.

Goblins, standing in a circle, with a hobgoblin chief in the center of the circle. However, the adventurers couldn't give two sh*ts about how they were placed.

All the goblins were dead. All of them mutilated in various ways yet they continued to stand even after death. One had its chest opened up, his ribs pulled back till it appeared that he had wings. Another had his entire body cut, the cuts wounded around as if in a strange pattern. Another was holding its face as if taking off a mask. Another was stabbed multiple times with blades, he was on his knees, the blades sticking out of his chest like a blooming flower. Yet none could be as unsettling as the hobgoblin chief. He was kneeling on one leg, his head opened like a box, his hands were holding his brain as if offering it to someone else, and his face... was as if he was proposing to the love of life.

Blood was everywhere, yet it did not seem random, the many splotches seemed to highlight the brutality, seeming both natural yet too controlled to be considered such.

Such a display was unnatural,

It was heresy,

It was hideous,

It was madness,

It was...

...

...beautiful.

"HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!"

The healer burst into laughter, then she fell unto her knees and began to weep. Madness on her tear stricken face.

The mage was next, he fell to the ground clawing at his own eyes, blood flowing freely from his face.

The rest came about in due time as they saw the entire piece.

The leader was last, blood flowing from all his orifices, as he tried to resist. He realized when he saw it, that this place exuded madness, he realized why this place seemed strange, there is no life, no chirping of birds, no buzzing of insects, despite fresh corpses present. In his hands, were the crushed remains of a crystal. The last thing his sanity told him to do.

None of them were allowed to leave, none could, after all, everyone must appreciate art.

Then they moved.

The piece may have been finished, but improvement is always a good thing.