Dungeon Advisor: ‘I’ve seemingly woken up before my dungeon, I know that I should be able to leave the dungeon and gather resources to help it develop but I wonder if I should stay and wait for the dungeon to wake up first’

The dungeon advisor was conflicted about what it should do but decided to check things out first seeing as currently, the advisor was in a spiritual form, it could sense its surroundings, but only a little bit, it tried to spread its senses outwards and soon felt a bubble around it. This would be the dungeon's area of influence, now that the advisor was aware of this bubble it could connect to it, and use the dungeon's senses as its own. Thinking about this it opened its status screen with a thought.

Race; dungeon advisor, LVL; 1, Rank; 1

Hp; 10 Mp; 1400 Sp; 100

Banked values; hp; 0 mp; 0 sp; 0

Traits

As a dungeon advisor, you have the same traits as your host dungeon, as well as having two other traits that allow you to accomplish your main goal of helping the dungeon to make a thriving dungeon able to challenge and lure in droves of adventurers.

Fast development; you find yourself physically and mentally ahead of others of your species of the same age.

Combination; you can combine skills, traits, and other similar features to form stronger ones.

Status bank; you can store hp, mp, and sp when you're at maximum capacity, up to double your maximum capacity.

Investigation; Allows the user to interpret information gathered subconsciously, and consciously about a target, to build a suitable profile about the target(s).

Mana attunement(Rank 7/7)[Number of times purchased 7/7]; Allows the user to become attuned to a type of mana, and use it at a higher proficiency than normal users of mana. This trait has been maxed, allowing you to have the chance to upgrade them by completing a challenge.

Assimilation; Allows the user to mix and match parts of two or more living creatures to make a single creature.

Bio manipulation; Allows the user to bend and mold biological material as they see fit, mana costs vary based on the changes being made.

Bio enhancement; This Allows the users to enhance the natural traits of a living organism.

Observant(Rank 3/3); This perk is only available to those with keen senses, with this perk your senses as keen as they might have been, become honed to a finer degree, whether this is taking in more information in half the time, seeing better in the pitch dark, being able to hear things through solid walls like they are happening next to you. This trait has been maxed, allowing you to have the chance to upgrade them by completing a challenge.

Enhanced foundations; never fear destroying your future potential by learning at your own pace, this perk removes any hidden or advertised negatives that a skill, perk, or title increasing in rank could have, as long as said negative only relates to increasing the rank of said skill, perk, or title before maxing out its level.

Deconstruction; this perk allows you to deconstruct anything inside your influence into its base parts, including skills, perks, titles, and non-living matter. Your ability to affect living matter is unchanged, and you will have an easier time deconstructing your skills, perks, or titles than someone else's.

Dense energy(Rank 7/7); your energy, HP, MP, and SP all count as seven, rather than one point. This trait has been maxed, allowing you to have the chance to upgrade them by completing a challenge.

Dungeon lord: Allows the dungeon to set a monster as the lord of the dungeon this will allow the dungeon to send out its monster past its borders, and this dungeon lord will be able to have limited access to the dungeon cores powers.

Avatar creation: This allows the creation of an avatar, this creature will enact your will and will convert your Mp points into the creature's health points, it will stay active for the same number of days as its maximum Hp.

Empowered contracts: Allows the signing of a contract, with a creature that will bind your statuses together, allowing them to have the same status as you, and you will have the same status as them, the highest number, takes priority.

Mirrored mind: allows you to form an exact copy of your mind, this will take over the subconscious systems of your body, allowing you full control over them. It also enhances the abilities of a mind to multi-task by enhancing the total amount of processing power an individual has.

Split mind: This allows the doubling of your mind, allowing you to have two separate trains of thought at once. It also enhances the abilities of a mind to multi-task by enhancing the total amount of processing power an individual has.

Enhanced focus: This allows the usage of deep meditation to focus solely on one task for prolonged periods. It also enhances the abilities of a mind to multi-task by enhancing the total amount of processing power an individual has.

Sense share (dungeons senses to dungeon advisor: one way); allows one to share the natural senses of another, this trait unlike what could be seen by others is not able to progress to sharing senses two ways. You may only have the senses of your dungeon, this does maintain itself once you are outside of its area of influence but will never allow you to share senses with your dungeon.

Matter warping; you may force the matter making up an item into a separate space, this does not allow you to store things indefinitely, nor does it allow for the arresting of objects with momentum, any object moving relative to yourself and the dungeon is incapable of being stored. You may only store up to the same number of your mana in cubic meters.

Seeing that the traits had been added properly made the advisor feel like a plan was coming together and only needed for its dungeon to not go combing skills willy-nilly. This alone made it want to stick around so that this wouldn’t happen, but it also knew that it could take several hours before the dungeon woke up, so thinking about this the advisor began moving towards the dungeon core, a small sphere barely 2.3 inches in diameter. It contained an almost rainbow-like shimmer to it that represented the fact that it contained all the basic elements of mana. The advisor mentally stretched its form, further and further until it was around 3’6 feet tall, then it mentally selected to take the form of a Kobalt. After taking this form the advisor grabbed hold of the core, gently almost feeling compelled to treat the core as an infant, those basic instincts that all creatures felt towards their young at least to some extent. The advisor knew that these emotions were being pumped into it by the bond between a dungeon creature and their dungeon. But it felt that there was a better use for these emotions, it began using them and the instincts from the Kobalt to find a perfect spot to hide the dungeon core. And soon a large oak tree came into view, its towering form of some hundred and ninety feet tall must have taken a hundred plus years to grow.

And in a world with magic, anything that old is rarely if ever normal. And while the Kobalt instincts were highlighting the base of the tree, the roots, as an incredibly beneficial spot to hide the core, the advisor had a different thought process. The Kobalt pressed its hand against the tree and began pushing massive amounts of mana into the tree, overwhelming any sort of natural defenses it might have had, and then began using its ability to modify living things, it hollowed out a tube for dungeon core down to the forest floor under the majority of the tree roots. Then took the shape of a sprite and pushed the core down into this hole, away from prying eyes.

With a single nod, the advisor sent its form careening outwards towards the forest, it had already started forming a plan for how it would gather resources for the core in the most efficient way possible, even before it crossed out of the dungeons sphere of influence.

Hours passed, and the twin suns caused shadows to play and dance across the world at large, but as the sun's light retreated from the world, these games took on an alternative meaning, shadows that danced in the light, now stalked in their final moments became sinister they almost took on a life of their own, they each acted as seekers for the light, banishing it faster than the light could come into being, the shadows were short-lived, they had only started life a scant few hours ago, and now we're feeling the cold grasp of the void, as without light shadows are mere figments of history. And without shadow or light, all that remains is nothingness, a void exerting pressure on the whole of existence for no reason other than to punish the sins of those that created it, and all beings within this void are responsible for its birth one way or another. In moments like these some worlds search for a hero, they feel this pull after so many years of being pushed around by these forces, that they look outwards towards the stars and other worlds to find heroes. But in this case, almost like the signal at the start of a race, just when the suspense couldn’t be higher, nor the energy be more compressed under the weight of this void, a shooting ray of silver cuts through the void, and as if by magic, over the horizon a pale blue moon rises from the North at first it seems as if a great blue giant is starting to stand up, lifting the weight of the dark onto its shoulders, but this quickly becomes not enough to describe the mass and the scale of the thing crawling its way up from over the horizon, as it crawls faster and faster, taking more and more of the horizon, all that is visible from the North is the pale blue titan. It seems so close that the distance between mortals and gods must only be on the other side of it, hidden away from those unworthy. Giant craters mar the surface filling minds for generations of equally giant rocks colliding with the moon above, this pale titan using its own body to shield the weak mortals below from these attacks from the heavens. And under the great stage set by these celestial figures, their seemingly eternal dance yet unfinished. A thousand stages are set amongst these mortal coils. And yet outside of these stages of man and their ilk. There are those great stages of nature, wild and untainted by human hands. And within this stage almost like they had heard the call from that pale blue titan life sprung out from their hides and like this the cycle was primed to continue for the rest of ever, but nature abhors nothing more than stagnation, after all this is why nature has such amazing scenes and also such horrible depravity.

With such diversity in what can happen, it's no wonder that even with the new life form born here in these woods, not a single soul was interested, nor could they know the significance of this new being born. Within these woods, a large oak stood proud, as it had done so for a hundred years before and would continue to do so for hundreds more. It had gained a new resident, one who was only just now starting to wake from their torpor. Its vision was blurry, it could feel the cramped walls of the tree hugging it, it was also being pinged by the system, this ear-retching sound was in fact what drew it from torpor.

Dungeon Core: ‘gosh, my head is killing me’ Mentally rolling over, doing the equivalent of asking for five more minutes and slamming the snooze button on the alarm. This obviously wouldn’t change anything because every few minutes there once again was the Omni present beeping of the system getting a new notification. The more the core tried to ignore these insistent beepings, the more they seemed to take umbrage with the core, until the buzzing and beeping began turning from a series of individual noises into a mess and a jumble of these noises acting together, becoming louder than they ever could have been by themselves.

Dungeon Core: “Gods I’m awake!!” The core pushed his sleepiness away and began probing away at his senses, thankfully his body came with a series of instincts for what a member of a species should do to survive, in this case, it was odd because he was the first of his species, but it was likely that the admins had been running artificial souls through tests, and he was the first official soul who was being put into a dungeon core. That would explain why the memories seemed so overlapped, but it wouldn’t explain why he was being almost forced into digging into the ground since there wasn’t an obvious reason why almost every single set of these pre-programmed instincts was attempting to scream at the core that being above ground was a bad idea. Seeing as it was fairly safe, the core pushed aside these instincts as best as it could, something that he noticed almost immediately was that as soon as he pushed them aside they all but went away from the forefront of his mind, seeing this the dungeon opened its status screen and began looking through the different menus. It almost immediately wanted to combine all of the different traits, but decided to only do that for the ones it had chosen because that would minimize the risk of any strategies that its guide had cooked up.

Combination + Deconstruction = Modify status screen: This allows you to add, combine, deconstruct, and remove parts of a creature's status screen as long as they are under the dungeon's influence.

Assimilation + Bio manipulation + Bio enhancement = Full bio control: Allows the changing of key physical features of a creature, the combining of physical traits, to create hybrid creatures that are stable and hence able to be recreated, and the removal of physical traits that are deemed as unwanted. Only allowed to creatures under the dungeon's influence.

Observant(Rank 3/3) + Investigation = Higher investigation: Allows the viewing of a creatures status screen, basic information is available without viewing this screen, but after viewing a creature for long enough you may be able to understand what a creature is thinking based on micro-expressions, body language, and mana fluctuations, this is based on the amount of information gathered subconsciously and consciously, based on your ability, you will start by being able to understand the basic structures of a creatures Bild and what abilities they might be capable of doing. This is not limited to creatures under the dungeon's influence.

Seeing as its abilities had been able to be combined rather efficiently, he found it even more difficult than previously to not combine all of the other rather obvious ones that would go together. Still, the core knew that if it waited just a little longer then it would be able to benefit maximally from the most likely rather well-thought-out plan from its advisor.

Dungeon core: ‘as long as I can keep that in mind I should be able to avoid getting too excited, and ruining its possible plans.’ “I should get my dungeon started, and this tree would be a good start for the dungeon.”

The dungeon began creeping its mana upwards from the inside of the tree, slowly enough that it could feel itself claiming the different creatures living inside of the tree bark. A colony of black ants was the first to be claimed, the common members of the colony unable to put up a resistance to the waves of mana coursing through them. The core continued unimpeded until it had claimed all but the queen herself, she was the first creature to put up any form of resistance towards being claimed, she was also the first victim of the core, just as she began thrashing around trying to throw off this perceived invisible attacker, her royal guards rushed towards her, she let them crawl onto her with no hesitation, why would she hesitate to allow her guards to defend her? After all, that was their entire purpose. But just as confident as she was that her guards would remove this intruder, so were the guards entirely convinced that their master had been insulted by their former queen, after all, why else would she scream out in pain when all they felt had been bliss from their master welcoming them into their true place in the world.

And like this they struck the first blow to the queen, cutting massive gulfs into her back, and the sides of her thorax. The queen paused, millions of years of evolution, had provided a certain level of underlying intelligence to the queen, she knew almost as well as another creature knows the suns would always rise, that her children would remain loyal to her until their final moments, yet these same children were currently ripping her apart with no hesitation, this moment of confusion only lasted for a few seconds, but in that time the queen had been ripped in no uncertain words to shreds and she found herself falling to the ground without being able to offer even the smallest amount of defense against her attackers.

In another part of the tree, far higher up than the ants on the ground, there had been a thriving family of tree mice, a unit of two adult males, and an adult female, there were also four adolescent mice, and a group of six newborn mice. When the initial wave of mana rushed over them, they felt as if the world itself was falling on top of them, this feeling was only just lessening when the second wave came crashing into them, they could feel their breaths hitch as the third and fourth wave at first distinctly separate entities combined into one and slammed their entire beings into the ground, there was no fighting whatever this was, just in the same way that there was no fighting gravity, soon they each felt their vision go dark, the smallest members of their family able to survive longer only due to the amount of mana crushing them being smaller, but even they soon grew quiet with further waves of mana. Even further up the massive oak, sat a small owl, who only a short few hours ago had witnessed her parents scoop up their older chicks and flee their nest. She had wanted to cry out to them to tell them that they had forgotten one of their children. But was also too scared to make a sound as dozens of other animals would love to eat a newborn chick, and take over the abandoned nest.

When these waves of mana began looming over her, she tried to let out any sound she could think of to scare away the rather imposing form before her. But the wave came ever closer, and as it passed the entrance to the nest, it was as if the physical weight behind it fell away, it still fell into the nest, filling it to the brim, and subsequently the chick as well. And the little thing felt so very sleepy, she felt as if the both of her parents combined had pulled her under their wings, inviting her to sleep. The little thing, exhausted as she was, obliged before she went to sleep fully, could hear herself thinking deep down that this was even better than her parents comforting her as they used to do.

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Just as the last light provided by the great pale blue titan in the sky began leaving the stage to the South, those first few rays of blinding light of the dawn began rising from the West and East. The larger of the two suns coming from the West, and the smaller of the two coming from the East. Those massive waves of mana finished flooding the entire tree with their will. And almost seemed to overflow down from those high-up branches back down to the ground, seeping into it to further the dungeon's territory.

The dungeon core had been aware of what had been happening but had felt like it had no control over its actions, different animals had been treated in vastly different ways, and it was almost like it was being guided into making certain actions with each species, and with each animal. For the ants it could tell that their simple minds would willingly join and would pose no resistance, it hadn’t known that the queen would be able to or willing to fight back, but had been shocked that the royal guard wanted to attack the queen, in fact, they had done so happily. Then there had been a dozen other smaller insect colonies, that the dungeon core remembered subjugating in much the same way, but those memories seemed almost as if he had been watching a movie and it had been fast-forwarded to the family of mice.

While he initially wanted to try doing the same thing it had done previously with the insects, it lost control almost immediately, the complex sensing abilities that the dungeon core has had access to his entire life so far, seemed to zoom in on individual aspects of those mice, almost to say that they were too complex to willingly join, but as the older mice started falling to mana overdose, the core had thought that it would be allowed to stop pushing mana into them, but instead the mana only sped up, and within seconds the first mouse died, sending flakes of soul stuff back into the dungeon, providing it memories and more importantly information on how to make a mouse, it had became one of its creatures, but not by choice, except like a puzzle it wasn’t able to see the whole picture, and almost like this movie reel had been waiting for the core to think that, it had been provided with an answer, as the second and third mouse died, more memories flooded back into the core, and with them more pieces of the puzzle became unlocked.

The dungeon didn’t want to see the baby mice die, and was rather happy when these memories started fast-forwarding again, this time on a small little owl baby. This the core remembered more vividly, seeing mice and other small mammals be killed and thereby being absorbed into the dungeon was one thing, after all these animals are considered in most worlds to be pests, but the core had felt a rather obnoxious amount of distaste for killing an equally, in comparison to the other animals, innocent owl baby and had pushed as hard as it could back against the seemingly automated instincts that these fast-forwarding events had come prepackaged with.

And just as the core was winning and just gaining ground and stopped the rolling tides of its mana from moving forwards it felt like it had begun slipping, being shunted to the side by this force larger than itself. It had almost begun falling into a pit of desperation over wanting to protect the defenseless baby animal, but before that could happen it felt its focus being tugged towards the nest, the rolling tide of mana slowing down, but not stopping. The core felt as if it was being asked to watch as its orders were being followed through by its loyal soldiers, a king trapped in layers and layers of bureaucratic tape, none of its new orders would reach the frontlines before it was far too late. Like a moment of clarity in the cores storm of thoughts and feelings, it decided to move to the nest, if it was going to be asked to watch what happened under its orders, even if he hadn’t meant for things to go this far so quickly it understood or perhaps thought it knew that its orders were being followed to the letter, and if the said letter was ambiguous? That was not the soldiers' job to question, it was their job to follow orders. And so with this in mind, the core brought its focus onto what was happening inside the nest. It would watch what was happening regardless of how bad it made the core feel.

Inside the nest, the core had thought it would find the poor baby owl being overdosed on mana, but instead, they had found the inside of the nest being filled with gaseous mana. Seeing as this was the first time he had seen gaseous mana, he was compelled even more so to watch, his focus being shown different parts of the whole owl. Almost as if it was trying to explain that the bird was even more complex than the earlier animals and that doing either of the previous options was not correct. It almost wanted to jump for joy, thinking maybe there was a different way to allow creatures to join the dungeon. The core was in the middle of doing just that while watching the movie reel, not remembering what was about to happen, the gaseous mana inside the nest began worming its way past the natural defenses of the baby creature. In only the smallest amounts. These seemingly insignificant pieces of mana began making their way towards the bird's brain, feeling out what parts of the animal's brain were in control of what…

The core needed a moment and was deeply happy when it noticed that the reel of its memories last night had been paused as it thought that. This happiness was quickly snuffed out by the realization, that it was watching essentially a ham-fisted tutorial over the different types of creature acquisition, it had seen what he had taken to calling “domination” with the more basic creatures, ones that had so little base intelligence that it could crush that spark of individuality with the smallest flex of will. It had seen “subsuming” where if a creature inside its influence died, by more questionable means, or otherwise, then it would gain parts of that creature's blueprint. Calling it a blueprint was going to be annoying, rather than annoying, and more inefficient, and that idea rubbed the core in the most awkward of places. The core shook the uneasy feeling off, by dubbing the term “schema” for the parts of these creatures, and with that moment of distraction gone, the core focused on the rather lightless abyss it was feeling over the last type of recruitment it could employ, as he saw it, there was no better term than “corruption” seeing as it was the act of taking what was already there, and making it more malleable to the dungeons will. While it was rather obvious that the bird definitely was still alive, and this could be considered better than being dead, can it really be considered living when your own thoughts belong to someone else, and if the core had anything to bet, then it would be more than willing to do so, that the next thing that is going to happen inside the reel would be owl's brain is fully mapped out, and using this info the cores mana would most likely stimulate parts of the brain responsible for recognizing the birds' parents. With a deep sigh and a hope that it was wrong, the core reluctantly mentally presses play on the reel.

And like magic, the core began watching the reel with a cold acceptance of what had already happened, and a more lukewarm questioning of where its so-called advisor had gone off to, especially considering that he had cost over half a million points. And once again the dungeon was rather amused about how easily it could separate out its thoughts into basic processors, able to interpret data yet offer zero additional details, or they could also seemingly give a basic spark that would allow them to have thoughts and ideas, looking over the information provided and making snap judgments based on it, they could also hand the information and their suggested action to the main conscious, aka the core, but these types of thoughts only distracted the core for a few scant seconds before it was dragged back to viewing the events of last night with its main conscience. Its other parts were left in the background to try using their abilities to control the members of the dungeon. “At least something is going to get done while I’m stuck watching this’ the core couldn’t help but think to itself. Before the “tutorial” could pull at its attention the core started back to paying attention to the memories. Soon the core saw that its mana had mapped out the entirety of the owl's brain, it had also mapped out the entirety of its body as well, this seeming dragged out the fact that the core now had the schema for these “Black-skin owl” The core was not sure that this was a type of owl from any of the previous worlds it had been on, but the schema seemed like it had only unlocked the baby form for both male and female owls and so it was not able to tell what the adults of the species would look like. During this internal dialogue, the core had also noticed that a thread of mana began forming from the owl's heart. It was almost as large around as the bird's entire body, but as it began leaving and shot its way downwards towards… The core jolted as it felt the memories of last night and its current situation match up just that little bit more, the mana thread had shot its way directly towards the dungeon core, becoming incredibly thin directly in the middle of the two, and then began growing in size again to the same size as it was on the other end of the connection. The final shape was something akin to an hourglass.

The core could feel this connection now that it had become aware of it, and was almost impressed that the tutorial had somehow kept it from being able to detect such a massive connection to a single creature, it could also now feel smaller, barely the size of a human hair, connections to its other creatures. There were already differences between the connection other than the size, the core was able to tell what the owl was feeling, and it could sense that the bird was having trouble staying asleep due to hunger. The core felt a part of itself welling up in response to this, the idea that one of its creatures was going hungry incensed the core, it decided to leave yet another part on figuring out how to feed its owl. While it focused on the differences between its creatures, the smaller connections didn’t let the core know anything about what was happening to them, but it could still order them to do things very easily, even without being able to feel the connection as the part of the core that had been focusing had been able to order the simple-minded subordinates of the core to start gathering resources underground and above ground near the tree. But once it was given access to sensing the connections the task of ordering the ants and other creatures it had under its domain it had became much easier, simply grabbing entire groups of ants by these strings and ordering them to continue finding food and other resources, when previously it would have been forced to do this one by one without these string-like connections.

Now that the main part of the core and this second part had joined back together the core noticed that its ability to process information directly increased by 25% or so, as soon as it thought that it once again like the tutorial it was still going through provided a single answer to the question still yet to be fully formed by the core, “75/75(100)” it could evidently create up to three more streams of conscious before it ran out of spare focus. With that the core split its attention once again, one mind being focused on finding out more information about its creatures, another one was focused on mapping out the surrounding area, since its guide had gone off on some adventure by itself and left the core to figuring all of this out, and more pressingly to fend for itself with a badly designed tutorial that was practically railroading it with doing what it wanted rather than what he wanted. Leaving those two parts of itself to their newfound tasks and leaving a little extra in case it needed to focus on something else, the core went back to watching the tutorial and internally kept hoping that it would end sooner rather than later. After a minute or two of the baby owl being added to the dungeon, and the connection stabilizing the view blurred as the memories became fast-forwarding all of those waves of mana coming together and almost leaping up into the air from the top most branches of the tree, going a solid 10 feet into the air, before falling, making a dome around the tree, the final distance of said dome being 10 feet from the furthest extended part of the tree in all directions. Then the movie ended, and the core no longer felt any tugging at its attention, other than a particularly hungry owl baby who was still asleep but getting hungrier.

There was a mental ping from one of the parts of the core, it brought him out of the contemplative silence it had been in for the last twenty seconds or so, he moved his attention towards the part of him that he sent to mapping out the surrounding area, it had found that its domain was a sphere one thousand four hundred feet across and down, it only went around 200 feet up into the air though. 190 Feet of that being due to the tree. And that its dungeon creatures couldn’t leave its area for very long, only around twenty minutes before their body began shutting down. Upon learning of this the core paused for only a single second before searching rather frantically for its connection to its advisor, and after searching high and low inside of itself and not finding the connection, the core came to two options, the first being that it didn’t have the same kind of bond between its advisor as either its normal creatures or the rather obscenely large link between the owl. Or that its advisor had spent said twenty minutes finding a suitable location for the core to set up the dungeon, and then died due to some reason. Both options made the core feel as though it was missing something but with no way to tell for sure the core would keep hoping that it was the first option. And now that it had a free-floating amount of focus it sent that part of itself towards figuring out what to feed the baby owl. The core attempted not to feel too sheepish for not starting that particular task sooner but was having a hard time not getting distracted by wanting to further manage its dungeon…

The core held out for all of two minutes before it started personally acting, it could try using its own creatures to dig out a space for the start of a dungeon, but felt that it would impede the other part of itself who was trying to have them gather resources outside and inside the domain. And since it didn’t have any available creatures to command, the dungeon started looking toward its list of creatures. Inside of it, the dungeon felt mildly aggrieved as it could see three categories of creatures, the first being labeled “combat”, the second being labeled “general” and the third option was labeled “workers” they were arrayed with combat already being open, and the other two options being to the left and to the right of the already selected option. It could see that it only had two creatures inside said option, “Slimes” and “Kobalt's” looking at the two options the core could see the same image of a general member of that species, very similar to how it did inside the void. Seeing that underwhelming selection it chose Workers because that seemed like it would fit its current needs better than a generalist or a combat specialist. Inside this option, it could almost feel the clockwork gears inside his own head coming to a grinding halt, inside was only a singular option “un-modified insects(eusocial, presocial)” this singular option made the core both incredibly, for a lack of a better term, grumpy. The core began noticing that the temperature inside of its alcove inside the tree had gotten a lot hotter than it was previously, and thinking better of letting its temper run its course decided to click on the option to see what type of worker it evidently had….. A deep regret filled the core as soon as it clicked the option, inside was what was essentially a game of matching the pieces, with all of the different parts of its creatures, or at least of the insect variant. “How am I supposed to dig out an entire dungeon for human-sized creatures, with tiny insects?!? First, they throw me in the middle of nowhere, then my advisor runs away, and now I find out that in the next hundred years all I’ll have to dig out of a dungeon is going to be a bunch of random insects, thank you, admins, I’ll get right on that” The core ranted, knowing that no one would hear it yell out in frustration, but thinking that it could improve its mood… improve, that reminded the core that it had thought its creatures choices were trash and so it had invested into traits that would allow it to modify them, and even the menu itself said unmodified, so maybe there was a chance it could make a larger insect use rather than having to spawn in billions of insects just to dig out a single larger than normal room.

Dungeon: ‘Hey aren’t I supposed to be getting a free creature as well? Tell me the admins didn’t also happen to forget that, did they?’ The core thought sarcastically while scrolling through the different menus, until it got to the last section of menus that it had available to it, labeled “logs” the core pressed it and hoped, once the window opened it was able to see a detailed record of every system notification it had received, including one stating that it had evidently in its earlier groggy ness pressed that it had wanted a tutorial and that it had skipped over the message asking to make a random draw for its creature. It opened the message from the log and accepted the random draw. A large spinning wheel filled the core's vision, its surroundings fading to black all the many different options for creatures were blank, but it nonetheless mentally grabbed hold of the wheel and spun it as hard as he could.

“Congratulations on winning a Shelled Monitor” the core felt the new creature being added to its creature list, and moved with it seeing a notification over “general” the core opened the menu and saw that this one was quite a lot more full than either of the other two options, “tree mice”, “slink tail”,” Kobalt”, “Slimes”, “Sprites”, and “Shelled Monitor”. The core was conflicted, and also confused now, seeing as it had the schema for an owl but it was nowhere visible, but that its creatures could fit into multiple different classifications. And conflicted because its newest creature seemed fit to the term specialist more than being a well-rounded creature, its body looked to be too long to support any sort of real height or weight. Its hind knees were parallel to its body, with around a foot of ground clearance for the whole body except for the tail, which made up a gradual slope downward, going, going all the way until the very tip of the tail who was so thin that it was capable of whip-like movements when the lizard was provoked.

The tail alone was as long as the rest of the body, the back section of the body, made up two feet of the creatures total length, and starting right around a quarter inch after the back leg joints a form fitting turtle like shell began, it had a dark yellow belly, with fine lines, and deeper grooves seemingly showing how the shell had come to grow over many years. Seeing these growth lines did bring pause to the main processor of the dungeon because as far as it knew it was able to make fully grown creatures as well as baby creatures, but then why did the creatures show signs of natural aging? While the main part of its attention focused on getting answers for this new burning question, a splinter of consciousness continued looking over the body of its newest creature.

The top portion of the shell could have fooled the core into believing that it was made of some form of meteoric iron, with how it seemed to glisten, and how it needed hundreds of tiny hairline fractures on it to allow enough flexibility for the lizard inside to breathe. It was also segmented into squares, each square had a large lump of extra hard material, well not extra hard, it was the same material just compressed and made rigid due to some bodily function. As these squares got closer to the edge of the shell and the front of the shell, these lumps would grow smaller, but also pointier. In total there were three lines of large lumps down the center of the shell, then two lines of lumps, on either side of the larger ones. They were around three quarters as large as the original but there were two lumps on each square.

Then there were the last sets of lines; on either side of the set before there were three lines of these. They were around a single quarter of the size of the second set of lumps, but there were five of them per square, and they were pointy enough to break skin if something tried to bite them. The shell that until this point was doing a fine job of cosplaying a turtle shell began swooping upwards like the roof of a house, the final shape of the shell being vaguely inspired by a mix of a turtle shell and a saddle for a horse, this shell covered almost the whole body, bringing the total length of the creature to just shy of eight foot, not counting the tail as per normal lizard measuring standards. The lizards final foot of length that couldn’t be covered by the shell was the neck of the lizard, it couldn’t pull its head into the shell but it could fully raise the head to scan the area in front of it and have its head and neck fully covered from attacks from above and some attacks from the sides, if the lizard stuck its neck out as far as it could, only the top of the neck and the head itself would not be covered from attacks from above.

The main consciousness rejoined its splinter, and they simultaneously became aware of what the other had been doing, and what they each had learned. The first thing that became rather obvious is that if a splinter had nothing to think about other than trying its best to describe what was happening in front of it, then it would use one hundred percent of its processing power towards that, but that seemingly led to rather overzealous reports about rather simple things…

‘That's definitely going to come and bite me later, or more aptly I’ve already started the thing that is going to be biting me with those split off versions of myself running around, gathering needlessly complex and long winded explanations for things like “The ants have little hooks on their feet, and the use those to climb”’ The core could almost feel itself shivering in disgust over that, but like all good bosses the core came to a rather obvious executive decision, that being to use its advisor to the best of his abilities and to put him to work, once he showed up, dealing with the no doubt massively complex nigh brain melting levels of information that those split minds had spent their valuable time gathering. Oh yes what a wonderful and perfectly reasonable plan it was.

-fin.

Somewhere deep in the depths of the planet, a great eye opened, it seemed dyed a deep green, it painted a serene world of great forests, but it was also unfocused as if waking from the world's best nap. Then a spark of life made itself visible, and this lone eye frantically began looking around. The great planet of green inside its eye was now beginning to heat up, lines of red began appearing, causing the green to turn slowly towards a sickly yellow green color, and as the frantic search began reaching its crescendo it stopped a single line of void black began growing more and more slim, concentrated down to almost an individual pixel in the great vastness of the world. The pale yellow green was swiftly replaced by a deep yellow, with radiant lines of pure crimson red dying sections a bronze orange color. The great beast connected to this eye soon lost interest in whatever it might have been paying attention to, thinking that it would finish its sleep and go check it out later. And with that the great eye and the beast with it closed themselves to the outside world once again