2739 Words

Slowly Quin regained his consciousness. At first he was disoriented and began panicking when he couldn't move his limbs, but then he slowly regained his memories.

"Open . Self status." was his first mental command. The specific command did not matter as it only was crutch Mana cultivators could use to better direct their Mana to do what they wanted. With enough familiarity with the spells crutches like chants, commands or gestures could be abandoned later on.

The is one of the innate magics that all dungeon cores possess as it helps them manage their dungeon by giving them information on possible creature and environment creations as. It can also provide information and knowledge that the caster originally does not possess like the level of training intruders possess and what they specialize in. The divine sense all cultivators train and use is thought to be inspired through the magic and similar to that divine sense was also limited to cultivators on the same stage of training or lower.

He got information that unfortunately were nothing new to him. There were no cracks in his crystal, he had the basic minimum mana he needed to live and he had 0% Mist-Mana Cultivation. Mist-Mana is the most basic mana that every magical being that cultivates starts with and by cultivating and later transforming it they can progress in their cultivation. Monsters were an exception as they passively absorbed mana but didn't actively cultivate it.

The term 'cultivating' formed, because progressing ones Mana capacity was often compared to growing a plant. If you cultivate, you grow your effective Mana pool and the growth progress you are currently at and the whole process was creatively named 'cultivation'. Ancient Mana users could be dubbed geniuses when it came to this so called cultivation and its techniques but their naming sense was truly unoriginal. But since there was no use in fighting the established terminology he just went with it like the rest and now no one even questions them anymore.

Slightly dejected at the loss of all his painstaking cultivation he began scanning his surroundings and found himself to be encased in solid stone. Slowly he then began using his Mana to dig a room around him. A few hours later he finally dug a 5x5x5 room with himself at the center. That he managed to dig this room in only a few hours and not a few days was all thanks to an advanced mana gathering technique for dungeons that he had traded for a considerable amount of divine power with a dungeon that had just ascended for a few days and was in desperate need for energy to rebuild his defenses.

That was one of the main ways he and his friends had gathered information on dungeons. They split into groups of 4 people and sniffed out new dungeons through various means and then friendly reminded them that the trade was very favorable for the dungeon, which it was, and that dungeon crystals were awfully fragile, which they were.

New dungeons almost always had the instinct to dig until they reached the surface and leave 2 puppet monsters in even intervals in the tunnel. Only when they were done with that did they begin to draw in Mana to cultivate.

Quin however knew that it was better to first train oneself and build a healthy ecosystem with non-puppet monsters so that the time he would have to spend waiting for cultivators could be used by the monsters to reproduce and establish their nests. Although puppet-monsters only cost 1/10th of the Mana of regular monsters they have no real mind of their own, only stay in their designated areas and attack anything that attacks them or that isn't native to the dungeon.

A big boon that dungeons received was that all inhabitants had an extremely short maturation period while leaving their original lifespan as it was in the wild. This leads to dungeons being filled with all kinds of creatures constantly at war for territory and naturally attacking everyone that knowingly (other monsters) ors unknowingly (intruders) encroaches on it. Another side effect is that no one in the dungeon ever suffers from hunger as they either manage to hunt prey or get preyed on very quickly.

Slowly he began to draw in mana and started cultivating according to his cultivation technique. When he reached 10% Mist-Mana he finally surpassed the first hurdle as a new dungeon. A dungeon with 10% Mist-Mana can dig and control one moderately sized floor since that is all his Mana can support. He then began to dig his tunnel until he almost reached the surface.

Afterwards he began to widen his tunnel at regular intervals and slowly more and more rooms cropped up. After creating a good number of rooms began to branch out and create secondary tunnels and he also started collapsing his original tunnel at a few points so that intruders wouldn't be able to just waltz through to him. When he was done with that he began expanding behind his original room.

After one week he was finally done with digging. He had dug immortal caves for himself, but this was a whole different dimension. In the beginning there wasn't much one had to pay attention to other then not keeping the first straight corridor one had dug. When he had regained his expended Mana he started the next phase of his plan for new start. Monsters.

At first he would have access to a limited selection of random basic creature that existed on the world he reincarnated in. This selection would expand step by step as he progressed along with his cultivation. This was one function of the Magic that was unique to dungeons. Most of the time the magic was used for strictly administrative tasks or explorations of unchartered territory.

"Open . Creature list." Once the command was given a very long list popped into his mind. First he selected basic . These were basically normal animals that could absorb minuscule amounts of Mana and very rarely also evolved into with . They could basically be seen as Rank 0 .

First he selected various insects and worms that would be at the bottom of his dungeons food chain. He then spread them evenly across the rooms and added Basic like mosses, fungi and grass for them to feed on. After a bit of contemplation he added plants that looked just like the others but had special effects like inducing sleep through pollen or paralyzing through ingestion. The inhabitants of his dungeon would be immune to that but it would discourage overzealous cultivators from picking his dungeon clean as these plants could be used for pill-concoction.

As the dungeon was too dark for the other creatures he wanted to put there he began placing . These crystals were a type of life form that glowed in a light blue tone and sprouted little crystalline roots into the stone walls. Through these roots they would regrow with the ambient Mana when cultivators harvested them.

Then he began adding rats, mice, bats, lizards, amphibians and snakes. They would feed on the smallest creatures or plants and be food to the slightly bigger animals or monsters who couldn't really be bothered to go hunting for insects. Afterwards he created a tunnel system which was just the right size for the little critters and their nests as he didn't want them to be wiped out by their predators and he also added little streams of infinite water that would flow out of cracks in the ceiling.

These little streams would feed the many small and medium sized depressions he created in the ground and form ponds for the amphibians and fish he added and then flow into a hole in the ground back into the nothingness they came from. He pondered for a few moments where these streams came from and went to but in the end he couldn't come up with a satisfactory solution and wrote it off as one of the illogical quirks that would occasionally pop up when magic was involved.

After waiting for two days in which all the added animals were done setting up their nests and producing the first offspring he added the first to the dungeon. He was unfortunately limited to beasts at Rank 1 and Stage 1, the equivalent of his 10% Mist-Mana cultivation as anything below that would just constitute as a and anything stronger would be at risk to slip his control and exit the dungeon as soon as he opened the entrance. That would just be a big waste of Mana.

And so he added and as swarm creatures that were weak individually but bested their foes with superior numbers, and that lived in small groups that were hard to kill because they were either very quick or just had the best defense, and as hard to deal with individualist as they used acid and poison and and that would form small communities and were relatively harmless as they would only attack if provoked.

Apart from the last two species the rest of them were pretty self explanatory. are a type of golem that could reproduce and have an exceptional camouflage capability in the mountains or in caves. They only feed on stones and Mana which makes them perfect for this environment. Furthermore their feces can be eaten by the other inhabitants of the dungeon to harden their skins and maybe trigger an evolution for some and the longer a lives the more ores they generate in their body, making them a popular prey for many aspiring blacksmiths.

The are Mushrooms with little stubby arms and feet and also eyes and a mouth. They have very good regenerative abilities for such weak monsters since they can just sit on the ground, stretch out their mycelium and absorb the nutrients and ambient Mana faster. Another upside of them is that they can reproduce easily by just spreading their pollen on existing fungi, causing some of them to evolve. Unfortunately their only way to attack is by running up to their enemies and trying to ram them with their surprisingly hard caps.

Their bodies are a treasure trove of grade 1 crafting materials. Many budding cultivators craft their caps into shields, use their mycelium as the base for regenerative pills and potions and collect their pollen to start farms.

When Quin was finally satisfied with his dungeon he began designing a . The is always the most powerful being that currently resides on a floor and the designation as has a special relevance, because it is a is assigned to and bestows the cultivation of one extra stage to it.

First off he began making the double the size of his previously largest cavern that was situated at the center of his first floor and contained a fairly large pond housing the majority of the population. He then lowered the floor by half a meter, added a gentle slope to the entrance and then flooded it until the water was just about to leak out of the room into the dungeon.

Afterwards he raised several small islands and many rocks as stepping stones so that no matter which race the was he would be able to live there. After adding several slightly poisonous algae, paralysis inducing lily pads and covering the walls in plants he placed 20 there and provided them with ample fish as food sources.

To make the especially attractive, so that the would stay there, he placed a basic under the floor that would raise the Mana concentration in the room and make it easier to regenerate the Mana expended in fights and increased the passive Mana absorption rate of the rooms residents.

Since the already lived in the room it was very likely that one of them would grow enough to become the first but that didn't really matter since as soon as the boss was defeated another one would be assigned and the control of the room could shift over to another race.

He took a last glance at his dungeon to ensure that everything was in order and then took the last preparatory step and opened the entrance to the world, finally becoming a real dungeon. When he opened the entrance he felt himself getting ripped out of the ground and crammed into another space. The experience wasn't all that comfortable and he was glad that he had informed himself about this step and wasn't totally disoriented and clueless as to what had happened.

When a dungeon reaches the surface it becomes an independent world and gets rejected by the world it is currently in. Since the dungeon has to go somewhere it will get transported into its own little dimension that will grow along with the dungeon but a dungeon never gets completely removed from a world.

The becomes an anchor and a gateway into the dungeons dimension. The reason for the rejection is that the dungeons just before ascension can be as large or larger then the world they were born in. If the dungeon then ascends the whole world would be ripped apart as every tunnel is part of the body of the dungeon and ascends together with it.

So when a new dungeon reaches the surface it gets removed directly so that no problems can crop up in the future. The cave system that is left behind the entrance when a dungeon gets removed is commonly referred to as a 'dungeon corpse'.

Unfortunately cultivators can first visit the cave system that is left behind and can completely map out newly born dungeons without any risk and with all secret rooms where the dungeon core might hide. So to avoid getting killed right at the beginning, dungeon cores are very valuable after all, Quins first action was to move his core to a new and secure location. A dungeon getting ripped out of the world is never a quiet event and he was sure to have visitors in at least a month. And that was calculating that he could have been born in extremely hazardous terrain where neither cultivators nor wild monsters lived.

Now two question one might have are, first why bother creating life inside the dungeon and secondly why would you let in cultivators? Both questions have the same answer. Because it helps the cultivating speed. Every monster passively radiates Mana, especially in fights, and so do cultivators. When they refill their Mana they don't draw it from the dungeon but they draw it from the dimension the dungeon is in. So in essence they are one big Mana factory.

But to get to this new dimension the dungeon has to open itself to the outside world and since everything it contains is valuable it will never be left alone. Another reason is that cultivators often times have valuable magic treasures and materials on their body and the dungeon can analyze them, recreate them with Mana and give them to to the creatures inside.

After cultivating for just two hours he noticed two youths about 12 years old youths carefully entering. They were clad in light leather armor often used by hunters with one having a shield strapped to his back and a sheath with a short sword at his side and the other one bearing no apparent weapons but wearing a big bag that was likely enchanted with additional space.

Apparently he was born in a world that used Mana cultivation like himself. The lack of i.e. a magic pistol or rifle of some sort on the two that seemed like hunters was concerning but maybe he was just situated in some backwater place. At least they knew of enchantments. In the divine plane had such backwater regions too and he had settled there to live a few quiet millenia before their involuntary voyage through the wilderness and subsequent death.

After using the analysis on them he knew that they were named Grom and Cog and that they had the respective cultivations of 45 and 49% cultivation.