Goblin Cave had been thinking about creation.

Spawning mobs in was obviously the most expedient way of getting a living thing, but many of the creature templates described natural conditions for their creation: being raised by a mage, or summoned from some elemental plane, or so on. How one might actually encounter those creatures, outside of the context of a dungeon (if such things actually existed).

[Flame Wisp] was a perfect example: borne from unfocused mana in mana-rich regions. Goblin Cave would never describe its mana as 'unfocused', so despite the entire dungeon structure being saturated in its mana, there was never the degree of disorder required to spawn such a thing naturally. If "spawn" was the correct term for something happening naturally.

Goblin Cave flit its attention over to another featureless stretch of barren cavern on floor 51. It dug out a hollow, paying attention to the way it pushed and pulled its mana, banding it across the rock surface to flake it apart into small enough shards that it could absorb directly. This was a skill learned from long practice digging; back in the early days it had endless frustration with shuffling dirt piles around, or ending up with massive tailing piles from all the loose rock it produced in its endless digging. Now, though, the flakes wafted up on a current of its mana and dissolved apart, smearing out of mundane reality and into the system layer where they were represented more abstractly. It dug with drills and streams and breezes, effortlessly etching (what resembled) eroded, craggy outcroppings or water-rounded bowls out of the solid rock. The act of pulling back its mana was more challenging. Its mana fought against the vacuum, sending out ripples of instability through the air. The sensation was unpleasant, but right now it was precisely what it wanted.

The problem was... this was all still its mana, and even with some slight vibrations it got the feeling that was hardly what the system considered to be 'unfocused'. One of the most common complaints it had heard from adventurers was when they first stepped inside its entrance: "Ugh, I hate how dungeon mana feels," they'd say, or words to that effect. "It's so stagnant." Stagnant, or precise, or unnatural, and so on. There was a faint wobbling to its mana around its entrance, at the interface between itself and the rest of the world, and it had actually constructed some damping layers within the rock, decades ago, just to keep the movement down. It had been distracting.

But where it could damp, it could also, maybe, stimulate. Inside the rock, it had hidden (why had it hidden them?) spirals of mithril, and its curves caught and redirected the rippling mana from the exterior, helping it calm itself. If those spirals stilled the mana...

It spun out a collection of mana-transducing materials, manastone and mithril and coreglass, shaping them into twists and spikes and feeling how mana rippled around them. It followed the opposite path that it had done then: amplifying any feature that threw off the mana current, scraping away at anything that caused it to smooth out. The effect was quite grating. It became acutely unpleasant to push mana through the mess it had created: a series of jagged gratings that ran almost but not quite parallel, and which immediately fragmented any mana it pushed through them into a mess of discordant harmonics. Focusing on the rest of its dungeon became difficult, with the equivalent of a shrieking din wailing away down on the 51st floor. Fortunately, the moment it stopped pushing mana through the turbulence subsided.

It encircled the entire thing in a tunnel of mithril, to contain the turbulent mana, and placed a simple mana pump on either end -- a pair of golden plates with an even grid of holes punched through them. When they spun, the interference pattern of overlapping holes created a slight mana imbalance on one side of the plates, and thus pulled mana through slowly.

So now it had created an awful racket in a box: mana was continually drawn into the tube, where the gratings decohered it into a wild cacophony of mana varieties. It slowed the second pump on the other side, letting the wild mana sluggishly leak free and make its way back into the rest of Goblin Cave's mana pool.

It had no clue if this would do anything, but at least it was novel. Some part of it was pleased with devising a new trap: open some slats in a distant chamber, and connect a mana circuit to funnel the wild magic straight at a group of adventurers. If they complained about the mana flow changing when they entered its dungeon, certainly being constantly buffeted by mana flow changes would be even more unpleasant?

It had precisely zero mana-based traps of that nature in its entire dungeon. It only had one or two [Goblin Shaman]s, and it had never really explored any spellcaster branches. But, of course, the goblins weren't the ones making the traps. It seemed absurd to it now, how strongly it had limited itself. Why not have bizarre, impossible traps? It had access hatches to its pit traps, in case the goblins needed to fix broken spikes or haul out bodies. There were ramps to roll boulders up, to fit them back in its stonefall traps. But it could effortlessly move anything it wanted anywhere in its domain. Half the time it simply spawned in a new granite ball, when some unfortunate adventuring party was crushed by its traps. It could carve through rock with precision utterly beyond what any mortal could do. So why had it stuck to pits and spikes and stonefall traps this whole time? It had thought trap plants were novel?

In any case, if the idea was to see if it could naturally spawn a [Flame Wisp] simply from discordant mana, it would need to keep its racket-in-a-box running. Who knew how common that spawn was (if it ever happened at all)? The system box didn't give details.

It was already extremely difficult to concentrate.

To the left of the initial tube, it built another one, with fewer gratings: its discordant mana was slightly less shrill. And next to that, even fewer. It formed a series of tubes all the way down to a completely hollow one that let mana pass through unchanged. And then, dreading it, it moved to the right: packing in more and more gratings, making the current even more turbulent. In the end it built twenty eight separate mana tubes, with tones that ranged from 'unobtrusive' to 'intolerable'. It would keep them running up to whatever degree it could stand and see what happened. If anything happened. Maybe [Flame Wisp]s needed a much larger volume of discordant mana? Certainly nothing particularly interesting was happening with the mana turbulence so far. Or maybe even 'intolerably discordant' to it was only a slight ripple in the eyes of the system, and it would need to build out tubes to, say, the three-hundred forty-third, before it was turbulent enough. Maybe, and this was what concerned it the most, there was never really such a thing as a flame wisp. Maybe it was just a thing invented by the system to fill a template slot, just as real as the witch's curse over in Darkwood Grove. Maybe all it had accomplished here was making a constant frustrating distraction.

That would still be preferable to more fake caves full of fake goblins.

It ended up keeping the first twelve mana tubes playing. Its first one was now fourteenth, so, just a little more shrill than it could stand right now.

In the mean time... it cast about for other ideas to try. It still wasn't sure what exactly it was doing, aside from... releasing frustration. It could try to naturally spawn in more creatures, but it was lacking the drive. There would be something amusing about creating dozens of simulated environments, guided solely by the vague system prompts, to try to conjure up a true simulacra. Copies of copies of copies.

It was sketching as it thought, not really digging out anything meaningful: wind shades were said to stalk travelers in narrow canyons, and so it sketched out a zig-zagging ravine of faintly-glowing manastone through the canyon floor. Just that they stalk travelers, not that they were born there. Animated pebbles were fragments of greater stone elementals that retained their animating power, and so it transformed the tumbled polyhedra into manastone, crunching the material down until every one in forty nine polyhedra shone with the brilliance of mana quartz, not that it understood how stone elementals could move of their own volition. Living shadows, the system attested, naturally arose from corrupted mana in dark-aligned regions, and so it spat angled monoliths of brilliant lumenrock and inky voidstone from the walls and floor, creating a mess of sharp-edged shadows that stretched out into hazy blurs. And so on.

By the time it was done, there was hardly anywhere on the 51st floor it could look from and not see a mess of abstract construction: glowing cubes and dodecahedrons budding from the walls like geometric fungus; floor sliced apart into the neat forks of cubic ravines, bleeding blue-white light into the open air above; slabs of voidstone sucked up light in swirls; massive mana-decoherence tubes in various tones erupted in precise rows down the sides of the walls. It liked the look, it decided. Haphazard and barren-looking still, yes, but it was an aesthetic it could do something with.

While it was considering, it added in a water source too. Primitive life was something it did, actually, know how to grow from scratch: there were all sorts of spores floating through its air, carried down the ramp from floor 50, and all the more opportunistic varieties needed was water. Usually, when it made water sources it hid the true sources -- a twisted sphere of mana that pulled down on system space, constantly emitting water from its system stores -- somewhere unobtrusive: inside a wall of porous rock, to make it slowly seep through in a faux spring, or sometimes from a recessed shelf far in the ceiling, to create a waterfall without needing to fully plumb the entire dungeon floor.

Here, it placed the water source smack in the middle of the maze of glowing walls, providing an unmistakable view of the perfect orb of water, constantly sheeting droplets down. The water puddled and ran, forming a rapidly-growing pool. It cast around, flitting across the sloping, uneven cavern floor that it had never designed to guide water, watching as the water flooded into the glowing crevasse with a gurgle. Eventually it decided to place the matching water sink in a overflow catchment raised up in an equally-prominent pillar, so that eventually maybe half the cavern floor would be flooded under near a human's height. It linked the sink/source pair together in system space, so they'd cycle through the same water once the chamber was filled -- though at this rate that would take months. It took a lot of water to flood a cavern. It imagined the result would be fairly interesting: glowing shapes carved under the constantly-ripping water, sending muted caustics flickering across all the smooth crystalline shapes it'd burst from the floor and walls. Fungi and mosses of who-knew what varieties could find their way to the emerging shore, maybe eventually creating thickets -- but it had no clue on the timespan of that. It hadn't spent an awful lot of time waiting for things to grow, not when it could grow things by force.

The thought of anyone else seeing this all was more than a little absurd. This was all below its core chamber; there was no reason for anyone to ever step foot on floor 50, much less 51. But all of this aimless building had given it some ideas. It had a wealth of materials stored inside its system interface, and even more it knew how to construct on its own. It had always limited itself to naturalistic rocks and ores, with only a small diversion to masoned rock with the hobgoblin town it'd tried building on floor 37. But now... even if it wanted to try spawning some creatures naturally, why bother to make it look natural? If it wanted to reveal itself to the world at some point, that meant digging deeper, producing ever-more-deadly monsters to protect itself from the consequences of its actions. And that meant experimentation. It also meant...

The creature templates were very precise. One monster class (with subtypes) per tier per element. A rotten ontology, a metastasized taxonomy, demanding all of reality restructure itself to hew to its categories. Would allowing two be different? Ten? A hundred? Would that meaningfully change the nature of the system, which provided with grim finality a complete enumeration of everything that could possibly exist?

By what alchemy did one mix one [Goblin], tier 1, and one [Warg], tier 2, to get a [Goblin Rider], tier 3? It did not create that combination, it had simply... unlocked it, in a rolling blueprint that had already existed long before Goblin Cave had been around to unlock it. Someone else had already ordered all of reality, and it was stuck simply unfolding into the space those orderings established. It wanted to push out beyond that. It wanted to spawn something that the system couldn't categorize at all.

But, looking at its so-far lackluster attempts to spawn a flame wisp, it might have to start with something more practical. If it was stuck inside the system, there was, at least, one single interactive aspect of it: the rankings. Ranked by whom? According to what? Certainly, its "Narrative" ranking hadn't changed one place despite the mess it'd made of its 51st floor. Did that mean adventurers had to see it, for it to count? Did the adventurers themselves rank it, or were they only a medium through which something else did the ranking?

Who knew what else could be possible within or without the system. It would keep experimenting. But there was one thing Goblin Cave resolved: if nothing else, it would make itself the lowest-ranked "Narrative" dungeon in the region!