Chapter 24 - Just eat more fruit!

(Wang Yue's POV)

"And that's about how it went," I told Diana while munching on one of the fruits she had lying around her new office.

"That is really strange..." Diana replied, her eyebrows creased in deep thought.

"What about the mana signatures I asked you to check?" Now that I had the meeting with White out of my way I wanted to check what I had missed.

"Oh, nothing much, just a dungeon." She casually replied.

"A dungeon huh. Normal or sentient?" I asked. Both of us have been around long enough to not be too surprised about a dungeon.

"I haven't checked what type yet, but judging from the elemental particles it discharged, it was most likely a newborn one, probably no more than a few weeks old." She replied.

"Hmm... What do we plan on doing with it?" I asked.

"I'll have one of the Silver Rank parties explore it for a promotion quest or something, but what we do with it really depends on the type it is." She replied, picking a fruit for herself.

"Haha, maybe we'll get a sentient dungeon," I said jokingly.

"As if, why don't you try that lottery thing the Merchants Guild has been pushing. You'd have a better chance of winning that." She replied jokingly.

Sentient Dungeons, unlike normal dungeons, have a soul, which makes them intelligent. Only a dozen such dungeons are known to currently exist. Two of them are completely inaccessible to man, a handful could only be accessed at certain times or under certain conditions. And the rest are known to be almost impossible to conquer. Such dungeons only appear decades after the last. I heard a great war was waged against sentient dungeons a few centuries ago, but it was before my time and I am no scholar.

Normal Dungeons are different, they spring up every year by the hundreds, have no soul and operate completely at random. In fact, there is no guarantee a normal dungeon would even survive for long. Sometimes they don't even open a passageway to allow their elemental particles to be discharged, some manage to kill themselves somehow, some become impossible to clear. They are completely unpredictable, unlike sentient dungeons which some have managed to reason with.

The most recent sentient dungeon to be born was the Cave of Desire located in Falharmus, born 20 years ago. It shouldn't be time for another sentient dungeon to spawn. If one was born so close to me I might as well try my luck at the lottery.

We continued chatting on for the rest of the hour. Anyone who saw us right now would not believe we were the same people fighting just a day prior.

But then again.

Diana could never kill me if she just used fireballs.

(And back to our lovely dungeon, apparently I'll be crucified if I don't include a bit of dungeon development in every chapter. Which I suppose is the point of a dungeon novel.)

After the skirmish has ended I filled the hole mostly with dirt using Edit. Unfortunately, I can't just make things out of thin air using Edit so I had to dig random holes in other rooms just to get enough dirt. A few more shrimps came through the hole while I was working, but the new soldier ants easily dealt with them. I believe there is an ant colony somewhere in that cave system after all that is the only explanation for why those attacking ants even existed.

The Life Return magic spell that one of my dryads got is a spell that sped up plant growth for a bit. It seemed useless until I remembered that dryads were technically plants, so the nature spell could be used to substitute as a healing spell for them. I couldn't do it, you can't just expect me to dump mana into everything and hope it works.

The mushroom people, which seemed more and more useless as time passed on, god why didn't I pick ents, are currently just loitering around. I have nothing for them to do. While I could have them attempt crafting, their fingers are far too useless for any detailed work. It seems like the only good part about them is the fact I could instantly make dozens of them for cannon fodder.

The shrooms I'm experimenting on are about halfway through their growth. I attempted to speed one up but that just created a mushroom person with a dark variant. As far as I could tell, it releases a bit of dark mana upon using spore explosion and the resulting mushroom people are also of the dark variant. Their bodies have dark mana and they're basically just the moving versions of dark mushrooms.

The dark mana they released upon using spore explosion was promising. If their evolutions strengthened that trait I could have an army of suicide bombers.

Another option was to have them release enough mana to instantly grow another mushroom person from their corpse. If I could somehow have them be able to do it infinitely, then I could have an undying army of shrooms. That could make up for their bad stats. I mean it doesn't matter if they're soft as a marshmallow when literally hundreds of them are coming at you and just keep coming back. The only problem is how to turn it into an infinite cycle. After all, some mana is always lost.

But of those two options, the kamikaze option is far more likely and beneficial. I might be able to have one revive a few times but I could already do that just through my own mana.

The ants were recovering their numbers. The queen is feeding on the mushrooms which were left in the aftermath of the fight. I plan on having them go explore the cave when they have enough troops. With how quickly they could promote into combat types, having them actively go fight is probably the best thing to do. I already attempted to have one ant go outside but I immediately lost control of it. According to Penny non-intelligent species just operate on instincts when they leave my domain. Fortunately, the ants' instinct is to bring back food for their queen, so they just bring random foodstuff after leaving.

Those normal mushrooms sounded like the filler names to end all filler names. A few paralytic variants were spawned, it may have a link to the fact that most of these guys died while being covered in ant paralysis poison but I can't really prove anything. Afterall these Mushroom People aren't in the Dungeon Wisdom search engine and Penny had nothing on them either. I could ask about them in Forums but I'll do it later.

I had made the hole a lot smaller so no more dangerous stuff like the centipede could come out again. I hope, I mean they could dig a bigger hole but I would deal with it when I deal with it.

Other than that there's not much stuff to do. Being a dungeon is boring as fuck. Well at least right now. I mean at this point I could not do much. DP takes forever to accumulate. Using just mana could only bring me so far, mushroom people may be useless but I could get them without using DP.

It takes about 100 mana to spawn a mushroom person from spore explosion. Summoning a mushroom person using DP costs 50 pure mana.

100 mana would take an hour and 40 minutes to get, while 50 pure mana would take 500 minutes, which is about... 8 hours and 20 minutes. So if I just used spore explosion I could summon mushroom people at a rate almost 8 times faster than using DP. Which is a great ability if the mushroom people were something remotely strong but these guys fucking aren't.

Honestly, I better get something good off of my evolution experiment.

DP is such a useless thing. If my dungeon was cleared it would take weeks before I could go back to full power.

Damn if only I had something strong that could appear if I just dumped a few points of mana.

Maybe if the queen could spawn stuff faster, or if the Mushroom People became stronger then I could just duplicate them infinitely through spore explosion.

(Another POV)

It had no name.

It had no thought.

It only had instinct.

It only had two instincts.

Feed.

And Birth.

It had no thought. But it could feel it's masters thought.

It felt the thought. But it only understood part of it.

It understood.

Then, it 'thought'.

Not in words, but in the instinctual concept that was its entire life.

The whole reason for its existence.

It must birth more minions.

But it could not do so.

So it could only do the other thing it knew.

It ate, it ate until it could no longer.

It commanded its minions to bring more.

Because.

It.

Will.

Devour.

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&^#@?%* Privileges Initiated

Skill #*>@% Activated

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ERROR

Host not suitable.

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ERROR

H%st not suitable.

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ERR%R

Host not s%$table.

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@RRO%

Host %## suitable.

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ER#@$

$^@$ *^!# suitable.

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E@^$!

H#%! n&$ s#%^$ble.

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$^#!%

H&*t is s#%[email protected]

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You have acquired the Title:

Gluttony

Effect: $#@%!!^&

(001)

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