Goblin Cave's goblins settled in. The main pack found a rich fungal bouquet and glutted themselves on the more edible varieties, and then bedded down in a narrow crevasse, forming a piled heap. Other stragglers still meandered around floor 51, or made their way up to floor 50 in ones and twos. Even the solitary goblin that had delved its sub-dungeon eventually followed the currents up to floor 50 and met up with a second goblin. They fought before making peace. Goblins as a whole seemed to enjoy — or at least to inevitably construct — a hierarchical dominance structure, generally decided by who could beat up who else, and once all the goblins understood their position in that hierarchy they mostly stopped constantly fighting.

Goblin Cave hadn't entirely decided how involved it was going to be with its oversouled goblins. Normally, it set up simple schedules for its mobs — stay in one room, or walk a circuit, or patrol in rotations, depending on the mob and the floor design. Their... 'free will' could pose problems at some point. Already the goblins had decimated one of its fungal thickets. In fact, its core chamber was disturbingly exposed from the back: it was currently located behind floor 49, in an offshoot of the winding maze that formed the connection from floor 49 to 50. Since its 50th floor was unoccupied aside from the goblins, there was nothing stopping them from eventually making their way directly to its core, and while they weren't in any way a meaningful threat, it still sent a shiver of unease through Goblin Cave. Its goblins could do anything; it wasn't as if it knew what an 'actual goblin' would do in any situation.

It would want to change its core chamber, in any case: it was currently a lush grotto, with its core surrounded by a moat of gently-rippling water fed from hundreds of rivulets streaming from the ceiling (and the water-source embedded in the rock above it), splashing down across a fungal forest comprised of every single species of fungus or plant it had unlocked. The entire chamber was lit from above with spotlights of lumenrock, feigning sunlight streaming in from above. It did enjoy the look, but it was extremely tempted to replace the entire thing with a perfect cubic box of dense manacrystal.

That thought lead smoothly to another: it still wanted to redesign all its floors. And since it wanted to wait to change its upper floors, and it needed time for its mana goblins, in whatever form they would take going forward, to settle in so they could start producing excess soul, the solution to that was immediately obvious: start on its lowest floors and work its way up, altering and expanding as it went.

The other thing was... it also wanted its goblins to try delving its sub-dungeon again. It was, in effect, free experience that would be otherwise impossible to collect. Each time a goblin killed a mana construct, it transduced its mana (an extremely plentiful resource) into experience for that goblin (an otherwise very scarce resource), without any of the overhead it would otherwise expect from attempting to manually power-level the goblin. It also got the goblin skill experience, which was less hard to come by but also very useful.

This restructured its idea of what adventurers were doing in its upper floors. Consider itself in the place of the sub-dungeon, the goblins as adventurers, and so on. Things fell into place. Certainly it had an extremely strong impulse to dig deeper and hide away its core, and to populate its corridors with monsters. If it wanted to offload the work of actually maintaining and designing its sub-dungeon on an extremely complicated control node, it would also give that control node a strong compulsion to continue digging and adding new mobs, all to get the node to perform, through indirection, that same extremely cost-efficient transduction of mana to experience. Which wasn't to say that that was certainly what was going on — it still had no clue what occurred outside its dungeon entrance — but it was a compelling theory.

If it wanted its goblins to return to the sub-dungeon, it would have to put something there to entice them. Food would've been the obvious thing, if they had not already had access to floor 50 and its near-infinite amount of fungi. A core, full of valuable magics — that might work for adventurers, but the mana goblins currently didn't have language, much less the concept of value, and they could all already spray mana blasts anywhere they wanted. The inverse would be to punish them if they didn't: make the monsters go to them.

As it had been thinking, Goblin Cave had been absently sculpting the faux-core it had placed at the end of the sub-dungeon. A crystal shard, mimicking its own core of decades past. It wasn't difficult to instantiate a control node within it, giving the bare manacrystal a glimmer of its own, but...

It set up a very simple counter, attaching it with system threads to the associated spawns: every time one of its mana puppets could respawn, add one. Every time a mana puppet was killed, subtract two. Floor out at zero, and if the counter got to, say, three hundred forty three, then: increase the number of spawns allowed to the node, and let it command all the mana puppets out to the surface. A dungeon break.

It was, indeed, a very clever system. It would want to scale things, perhaps, and if the goblins kept delving it might need to dig out further floors. It had no clue how to even begin telling a control node to do its own digging. And, in fact, since there was a fairly large distance between where the goblins had settled down and where the entrance to the sub-dungeon was, it might want to construct further sub-dungeons throughout the 50th and 51st floors, if the goblins did in fact settle in and begin reproducing. It could imagine, in fact, a replica of the system it had sensed at work outside: drape an imitation of system-space over its floors, and anchor it to its faux-core. Push in mana on the system-layer, and let the faux-core absorb it — its own mana regeneration. If the mana formed a bottleneck, allowing buildup in the system layer, allow it to build and build until there was enough free to spawn in a new manacrystal chunk freshly tethered to the system layer.

Oh, the machinery of it was well beyond it. It didn't know how it could do half those things, in practice, much less automate them to that degree. But it was an enchanting concept: a replica world hidden within its dungeon, full of sub-adventurers delving sub-dungeons.

But all of that would take time, and would depend heavily on how its goblins acted. Even now, they were snoring and squealing, bellies fat on fungus, while others skulked through its underground groves and mapped the winding chasms of its 50th floor.

While its goblins settled in, Goblin Cave got to work.

In order:

50th floor, vast fungal-grove wilderness, with a glowcrystal-studded ceiling full of ink-black passages 49th floor, ogre-pit tunnels: a curving, looping tangle of cavern passages that opened on each other via lightless pits, full of prowling [Blind Cave-Ogre]s, and ultimately defended by its [Ogre Champion], its undefeated boss. 48th floor, ogre warrens: a shelf-like cavern populated by [Ogre]s, that opened out into a vast middenheap of refuse, home to packs of beasts.

... and so on up, floor after floor. It began digging on floor 51, forming another stark rectilinear manastone hallway, and then dug up at a sharp 45-degree angle until it was running parallel to the caverns on floor 50.

It carved out a parallel universe, socketed invisibly within the rock: miles and miles of branching, interconnecting corridors, all featureless smooth manastone. Vast rectangular halls; rooms honeycombed with square pits in a regular grid; rooms on their side, with connections up their walls. Forking mazes of dead ends and long colonnades of open space.

Goblin Cave had resolved to focus on building, letting its goblins survive or not, but it had only been a few hours before there was a snort and a jerk from the goblin pile.

Its reincarnation test had awakened. It blinked with bleary eyes, limbs weaving through the air as it tried to stand. It gurgled, bloody spittle spraying from its mouth, and the other goblins awoke: first squinting and then leaping up, hooting. The reincarnated goblin hauled itself up, legs wobbling, and took a tottering step before collapsing back to its knees.

Goblin Cave had almost certainly overdone it, but overdone what? It had reincarnated many mobs with increased awareness of their past lives, and it had never seemed to have this kind of... qualitative effect on the spawn in question. Its immediate guess was that the... memories? of its past lives were too much for its mind to take, now that it had a mind, but that was still just a base conjecture.

Meanwhile: the 'leader' goblin hooted denigratingly at the reincarnated goblin. It moved forward, threatening, and when the reincarnated goblin just blinked at it, still visibly disoriented, the leader goblin shoved it to the ground, snarling.

The reincarnated goblin used [Quick Recovery], a [Prowling Hobgoblin] skill, to phase back to its feet without moving through any of the intermediate steps. Then it used [Fatal Gouge]. At level 12, the blow was enough to mostly disintegrate the level 1 mana goblin that the 'leader' goblin was. The corpse flopped down to the ground in chunks, revealing blue-white glowing blood and greyish muscle.

The reincarnated goblin stared at the mess, blinking slowly. The rest of the goblins stared, wide-eyed, and slowly backed away.

Interesting. Given the reincarnated goblin's actions, it also seemed possible that... either its inherited levels meant it needed an even larger soul to provide the same 'oversoul' effects as the other goblins, or that it had inherited the listless, volitionless behavior of its prior lives even in a body that, what? That it could fully animate? Goblin Cave was still extremely unclear on the mechanics of the soul.

It captured the dead mana goblin's soul, ripe with its fractional excess, and dispatched it back to its regular respawn loop, letting its mechanisms spawn it wherever it was needed next.

It was very interested in seeing how its goblin situation evolved over time. But now it needed time to pass, so that it could observe more. Back to digging.