The next week was spent in a mixture of excavation and camouflage. The first was because Star said I should have at least as many floors as I had Levels. This was made easier by my Boundless Depths title let me use a Skill called Spatial Expansion. It made it so I only had to dig out a few small rooms for each floor and then I could stretch them to fit my needs. It was hard to do at first and took a lot of essence, but as my skill level went up it became easier. Star claimed that if I got good enough at it I could use it to trap prey so that no matter which way they ran they would always return to the same spot.

The camouflage was because Star said we didn’t want to be found until we were done with the first ten floors. She explained that I would always be stuck at my lowest floor and that there were some who would try to enslave me or use me as a power source. Worse, there were people who destroyed dungeons that they couldn’t control since dungeons were the easiest way for another faction to Awaken people.

I made bushes all around the clearing where I had built the cave. I left a gap facing the back of my mound of rock so the wolves I summoned could get out. Then to be safe I expanded the space in the cave and added a switch back at the rear so it wouldn’t look as deep as it was.

With that done I got back to excavating. At this point I had dug down twenty floors and now I was just digging around to the sides. I suppose it was more prospecting than excavating. I was looking for metals. I had found out that I could make non living things as long as I knew the pattern, and they would be real, but in order to conjure living things I needed an object to anchor the conjuring around. The stronger the anchor the more powerful of a creature I could conjure. I had a bit of an advantage with my Pack Conjuring, if I conjured one of something it would make lesser copies around it as long as I supplied the anchors. I only conjured a couple dozen bushes to circle my glade. I used a rock for them at first. The problem was that when a boar had uprooted one and an entire section of my barrier disappeared and the boar was eventually left looking at a pile of pebbles. Now I used dead bushes as the anchor to conjure live bushes.

Which brings me back to prospecting. Star claims the best thing to use as an anchor is metal or gemstones. While I could bring wolves from wolves like I did with the bushes, they could never be stronger than a weak natural wolf. She also said that my first true creature is special and will grow to the limits of it’s anchor even without a pattern. It is not unheard of for a dungeon to make a lizard and have it grow to a dragon in a few decades. Many Cores used their first creature as a last line of defense for their entire existence. So here I was looking for iron or gold like a two leg.

“Sky Dancer?” Star called from where she was gathering tree seeds to plant on my second floor.

“I’m still looking,” I called back. “I am starting to think metals don’t grow in this kind of dirt.”

“Dancer, No,” she called again, “we have a visitor.”

I returned my attention to the surface in a snap. I saw an old man with a staff and one arm in a sling. He looked sick and was muttering to himself. He had somehow wandered in through the gap in the thicket and was approaching the cave. When he got to the cave he hurried inside. I realized it was raining. After a minute he stumbled out without his staff and came back with some fallen branches. He stacked the branches with some dry leaves below them. He then pulled a small knife the length of his thumb and a flint from out of his sling. He held the knife in his teeth and holding a dry leaf against the flint he ran it along the blade, wincing at the sparks. Once he had the leaf smoldering he spat out the knife and blew on it as he brought it to his kindling. He quickly had a fire going. He pulled several roots from his sling and rinsed them in a trickle of rain water before putting them next to the fire to cook.

I wanted that knife. I tried to absorb it but couldn’t. I asked Star and she said, “You can’t absorb things too close to living beings, you can’t create anything either.”

I wanted to learn more but then I heard what the man was muttering to himself.

“I’ll show them all.” he said. “I’ll make a new village here and I’ll control everything. Everyone and everything will answer to Lord Ping Sun!”

The man was obviously unhinged, but at the same time many of the two legs seemed to follow crazy people. If he managed to make a village here I would be enslaved for sure. And I wanted that knife so I could stop digging for metal. And I was hungry. He had to die.

Before Star could talk me out of it I did something I had thought about over the last couple of days digging. Star wanted me to get metal or a gem because it had a large capacity for Aether or Essence. I already had the pattern for something with a huge capacity for Essence. The Soul Stone. When I absorbed it I learned to make not just the corrupted greater stone, but a regular one as well in a variety of types. Two chambers further into my first floor I created a large soul stone. It was the best I could make with my essence limit. While it sat there I cultivated as much Essence as I could. I reviewed what the little wisp had told me and what I had learned from conjuring the bushes outside. After about half an hour I was full of Essence again and ready to begin.

I wrapped the soul stone in my energy and pushed into it. When my Essence started to pour into the stone I started to shape it to the pattern that I wanted. The pattern of my perfect pup as if he had grown. For an instant both patterns existed at the same time. That instant is when I used my Pack Conjuring skill. Quick as that the pattern of the wolf covered the stone and seemed to replace it. With my senses I could still see the stone in the heart of the other pattern but it was completely subsumed.

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A dark shadow rose from where the soul stone lay. While you could see its shape, it was still not fully formed. Now I did something I hadn’t before, something I only knew I could because of Star’s guidance. I poured into the half formed wolf all the Essence I could while he was still becoming. Star said this was a risk because if I put in too much I could break the anchor and destroy the pattern. I had faith that the soul stone I made could take more power than I had to give at this time, so I kept pushing more into him, cultivating while I worked until I ran out having filled him with half again my pool of Essence. I watched as he finally emerged. A giant red-gray agouti wolf that stood as tall at the shoulder as my sister had. The tips of the ears, tail, and the breadth of his shoulders were darkened with bristing black guard hairs. The only flaw in his perfect wolf form were his eyes. Instead of the gold of a normal wolf his were black with a splash of white along the outside edge of each eye like a pair of crescent moons bracketing the dark new moon of his maw waiting to swallow you whole.

-You have Conjured a Greater Boss-

-Name your creation.-

“Dream” by which I meant Dream.

-The [Night-Touched Elder Dire Wolf Alpha], Dream, is bound to you as an individual and as long as he dies in your influence you may reconjur him with an duplicate or better anchor-

Mother, he thought to me, what would you have of me?

“Serve the pack,” I said, “there is an intruder in our den.”

Without another thought, Dream silently loped toward the front of the cave. He easily lept the pitfall in the second chamber and soon came to the switchback. He sniffed the air and curled his lip at the smell of unwashed man and smoke. Still without making a single sound he walked slowly into the entrance chamber of the cave. The man sat with his back to the wolf's entrance, watching the fire and the rainy night outside as he muttered to himself. Dream looked down and then intentionally kicked a pebble, making it clatter.

The man spun and saw his death. He screamed and grabbed his staff with his good hand. He swung it awkwardly and Dream easily jumped out of the way. He swung again and Dream grabbed the staff in his jaws, shattering it to splinters.

The man scrambled backwards as Dream stood growling and watching with his crescent moon eyes. The man tripped over his own fire with his bare feet, screaming and forgetting that his death was in front of him. When Dream did not come for him, he reached down and grabbed a flaming brand. He stood back up and threw the fire at the wolf standing in front of him. The torch passed right through the vision of the wolf and it disappeared into smoke. The old man sagged, thinking he had had a nightmare and was safe. That was when Dream came from his side and closed his massive jaws over the man’s head.

I was overcome with a rush of Aether unlike any I had before. There wasn’t a lot of it but it was richer than any I had had before. It was like a buck's hot fresh blood after a long hunt. It was like that first rabbit when I was starving as a pup before my sister found me. I realized I had eaten his death, and it was good.

Dream looked at the rest of the body hungrily. I didn’t want to eat this shriveled old man after the feast I just had so I absorbed the knife and other belongings before giving him a mental nod. I made a dozen copies of the small knife for Dream to use as anchors to summon his pack.

I noticed Star staring at my core. She had drifted down while I was bringing Dream to Life and now I could feel her attention locked on me. I could tell she was upset, but I couldn’t tell why.

“Are you upset that we killed that man?” I asked her

“No, of course not,” she shot back. “He had to die. I am a little upset that you sent a boss after him but Dream is your only creature, you had to. What I’m upset about is that I failed you, I didn’t even think about the soul stone as an anchor. I thought we were far enough from everything that we wouldn’t be found for a long time so I didn’t push you to find a way to make defenders. If instead of that man we were found by adventurers you could have been killed before you could summon Dream and it would have been my fault.”

“You are too hard on yourself, little one. I agreed with your reasoning. This was untracked wilderness and almost no one lives up in these mountains. The road is two days south and is so little used there were trees growing from it. This man finding us was either luck or fate and no harm came of it. Let it go. Now why was it wrong to send Dream after the old man?” I asked. I tried to project a feeling of understanding through the bond.

“Okay. Well, it is not exactly wrong so much as frowned upon,” she began. “There are three reasons for this. Firstly if a dungeon is too dangerous right at the start, adventurers and others see it as a threat and will often send powerful groups to destroy them. Second if you are too dangerous you will also scare off weaker adventurers who there are a lot more of. Remember that having adventurers just using Aether in your dungeon can be enough to help you grow and sustain you when you get stronger. Many dungeons have starved because when they got too powerful to easily destroy they made things so difficult that all the adventurers left, leaving them to run out of Aether. Lastly, just like you need Aether to live, conjured and summoned beasts and monsters need you to supply them with Essence or they’ll just fade away. They usually can get it from your aura without your help but the further from your core the weaker the aura; and the stronger the monster the stronger the aura they need. As it stands, Dream is so powerful he needs to be on the tenth floor or below if you don’t want to prop him up. That doesn’t mean he can’t come up to the surface for short times when needed but he should live down below. Instead, now that you have such a powerful first guardian, you should make some weaker wolves to guard your upper floors and make them stronger as they go down so that you don’t have to feed them Essence.”

Just when I thought I was done with monotonous work. At least I could make some puppies to watch while I expand the pack.