If Goblin Cave wanted to restructure its existing floors, though, it'd need to figure out some new monsters. [Lesser Mana Puppet] was absolutely an option for some revised upper floors -- and, looking about its replica first floor, they appeared nearly invisible, immersed in the hazy, shadowless light of the manastone walls. But it wasn't satisified with goblins and it wasn't satisfied with the mana puppets either.

What it wanted was something that defied the system classification. Goblin Cave knew that was going to be easier said than done, but there was no way to get to that point without trying some things out.

Of course, its first impulse was just to spawn another goblin. Here, now, it wasn't aiming for truth or aesthetics or anything like that. It was exploring the taxonomy laid out before it.

A goblin... with four arms.

New creature subtype unlocked: [Four-armed] [Goblin]! Four-armed goblin A common goblin, mutated via accident, eldrich mana, or wizardly experimentation to have four arms. Can wield bonus weapons.

The result wasn't particularly surprising. It was the same prefaced format used for unusual monster subtypes, and in fact it was on the same template page as the [Two-headed] [Cyclops] it had unlocked a decade-or-so back and stuffed into its level 43 boss room.

A goblin... with a wolf's head.

New creature template unlocked: [Beastkin Goblin]! Beastkin goblin A bestial throwback. One in twenty-thousand goblins are born with animal features, revealing their evolutionary roots. In ancient times, this species formed massive tribes with a primitive social hierarchy.

That was a little unexpected. The unlocked template blended the goblin and wolf features more completely than Goblin Cave had, giving the goblin hairy forearms and legs, as well as a mane-like mass of fur across its neck and shoulders. That was the 'true' [Beastkin Goblin]. The description was also interesting. Ancient times? So, if Goblin Cave had been around in ancient times, would the system description have been different?

Also, certainly it had spawned more than twenty thousand goblins in its lifetime; none of them had ended up with animal features.

Theoretically it could mix-and-match all of these attributes: [Two-headed] [Four-armed] [Bestial Goblin], and so forth. Permutations didn't seem like they had any real promise from a taxonomic perspective, though.

Also, as a matter of personal taste, it wanted something unusual to populate any redesigned floors. [Beastkin Goblin]s would have been an interesting mob to stumble across when it was still invested in its [Goblin Rider] mob, since that provided an interesting twist on a hybrid goblin/beast specialization, but now... no. Too boring.

It had enjoyed using manastone. The glow was nice, and the way it dragged the mind towards the artifice of the entire dungeon process was appreciated.

Manastone wasn't the material it had that was most like it's core crystal, though. There was also manacrystal.

As a fairly mature dungeon, it had long ago moved beyond its available mana being the bottleneck for its growth. Respawns were a much more constrained values, with the vast majority of them being locked up in its rapidly-cycling upper floors. Manacrystal, though... it could throw around as much manastone as it wanted without meaningfully dropping its mana, but making an entire floor, or even a particularly large room, entirely out of manacrystal would require some rationing over a fairly large period of time. Not that it couldn't do it, but it would have to weigh whether or not the appearance was actually worth it.

But in addition to forming rooms out of it...

Goblin Cave spun together a glob of raw manacrystal. The material didn't glow, exactly, but it caught the light and amplified it. The result, in the already well-lit cavern floor, was something that resembled a mass of glittering mirror shards: light flashing and twisting in beams around it as the material spun and twisted. Goblin Cave slowly extruded more material and shaped it, like molten glass, into the figure of a goblin. All the while, it winced at the mana drain: a goblin-sized figure of manacrystal was cheap, compared to its entire mana pool, but it was still easily more expensive than the thousands of manastone blocks it'd reshaped earlier.

Then, taking that absurdly expensive statue, it steadily pumped even more mana into it, forming passageways and connections, until--

New creature subtype unlocked: [Goblinoid] [Manacrystal Golem]! Goblinoid Manacrystal Golem A brutally-powerful arcane construct made from unalloyed manacrystal. This one has been shaped into the form of a common goblin.

'This one' was maybe the closest Goblin Cave had ever seen the system acknowledge a specific entity. But this, too, was a bust: it had unlocked the standard [Manacrystal Golem] decades ago, although it had never used it, and while [Goblinoid] was an amusing modifier it was also clearly labeled as attaching to non-organic targets only: sculpture, essentially. There would be no system-endorsed goblinoid pyrofungus in its future. That might have been an avenue of exploration, if it had the faintest clue how to make that itself. A goblin covered in pyrofungus would presumably end up as [Pyrofungus-infested] [Goblin]; it'd had long experience seeing fungal infestations on its creatures. There was no reason why a pyrofungus in the shape of a goblin wouldn't just be [Pyrofungus]. And so on.

It needed to... think of something else. 'Think of something unexpected' was, in general, impossible, or at least a deeply unproductive way to consider the situation.

Up on floor 3, an apprentice wizard killed one of its goblins with a mana beam. It was one of the most primitive spells available: a weak release of mana, constrained into a tight beam. Without the constraint, it was as harmless as a wafting breeze, but when tightly focused a properly-constructed mana beam could slice through adamantine. Not that the apprentice's mana beam was properly-constructed; it could hardly cut through a quarter-inch of goblin bone. One of Goblin Cave's local control nodes handled the spawn cycling automatically: freeing the goblin soul from the corpse and shuffling it on to end up... on floor 5, where a respawn slot in a swarm room had been vacant for the past ten minutes and only now hit the top of its priority queue.

Mana beam... Goblin Cave structured a goblin spawn, poking and prodding at its ability slots. It wanted a goblin that could cast mana beam. Not as a spell; that would be easy enough to just spawn a [Goblin Shaman], who among other things could be specialized to pure-mana spells and/or beam-type spells. No, it wanted a goblin that had mana beam as an innate ability. There was plenty of variance in the template: [War Cry], [Lunge], [Trip], [Sneak], [Goblin Kick], and many more were all built-in goblin abilities, and depending on how it spawned a goblin it could be granted more or fewer abilities, as befitting its various specializations. Spawning in a goblin with lesser abilities like [Sneak] was something it had stopped needing system help with ages ago, and in fact it had considered itself fairly proficient at artfully integrating unexpected abilities to its hobgoblins on lower floors. The problem was...

It would be difficult to explain. "Mana" wasn't just a fog that it pumped into a template. There was an order and a structure there, a balance that needed to be reached. The most obvious example would be to speak of the connection between abilities and mana cost: the more abilities a spawn had, the less 'stable' it was, and the more mana that was correspondingly necessary to successfully spawn it. This, like everything, was flexible, and through clever layering and assembly Goblin Cave had figured out several new spawn configurations that gave goblins custom abilities without any meaningful increase in mana cost. That was simple.

But there were many other balances to consider, with less precise labels. It thought of spawns as crystals in some kind of lattice, where the vast majority would shatter apart from disharmony long before the spawn completed, and the size of the space was-- unfathomable.

Mana beam... the spawn structure of a [Goblin Shaman] wasn't just "more involved" than that of a [Goblin], though it was. It was an entirely different structure, with different balancing and trade-offs, and as it pondered the idea it couldn't think of any way to stabilize the construct. It poked and prodded at the spawn template, pulling here, pushing there, reeling in in one place, loosening the weave elsewhere, changing color and tone, all to try to achieve the mana equivalent of hiding a boulder behind a mote of dust.

Eventually it wasn't so much that Goblin Cave got an idea so much as it noticed a pattern. There was a structure, a recurrence, if it loosened the framework in ways beyond what it had considered before. Pull the knot free, exploding the entire diagram into disconnected pieces, before repacking it as something entirely different but with a shared shadow.

The result couldn't be a successful [Goblin] spawn, but it seemed like it might spawn something. And it could cast mana beam. The template was a monstrosity: tier 0, but taking as much mana to spawn as a tier 3 creature due to the sheer inefficiency of the spawn structure. It was going to be extremely anti-climactic, Goblin Cave thought, if this ended up being something like a [Ghost] or a [Prism Elemental] or what-have-you, an incredibly contrived and elaborate backwards route to something it could already spawn.

Goblin Cave fed mana into the mess of a spawn it'd constructed, wincing from the screech of feedback, and had to clamp down the mana flow simply to keep the spawn from bursting itself apart. Mana poured into it, forming a shape, and...

New creature template unlocked: [Mana Goblin]! Mana Goblin An experimental creature created by feeding intense mana harmonics into a goblin yolk-sac over the entire gestational period. Can cast all tier 0 & 1 unaligned damage spells as free actions.

The mana goblin was strange. It had the size and shape of a goblin, but it looked almost painted: green skin marbled through with glowing bruises, with mana-blue veins fluttering up to the surface across its neck and jaw. Its eyes were a flat blue, with the same faint glow as manastone, and its internal flesh -- mouth and tongue, certainly, but also organs and intestines -- had the same manalight glow.

According to the system categorization, it fit neatly in a newly-unlocked "aberration" category, at tier 0. The system-granted spawn template had a mana cost a fifth of what it had spent (which was still nearly double the usual cost of spawning a tier 0 creature) and from cursory view the diagram looked roughly half as nightmarish as the mess Goblin Cave had designed.

A somewhat underwhelming result, for something that had been such a mess to spawn. And since it was still system-approved, it was a failure on that end too. Still, Goblin Cave liked it well enough.

If anything, it was a little disappointed it wasn't more artificial-looking. It was still thinking of ways to lower its "Narrative" score, and it didn't want to stumble into some theme of... mana-corrupted goblins mutated by a manacrystal mine, or anything like that. It wanted nothing but the most obvious artifice.

Still, the results of the experimentation were interesting enough, and gave it more thoughts to try out later.