Chapter 11 - Expansion II

Day 10

Thinking about his options for a moment, Neo decided that his second floor needed some adjustment if he wanted to create some kind of ecosystem. Two big rooms with wolfs and one small room for prey was not enough. He expanded the small room by 500 m². His plan was to block the wolfs from entering this area. Then his prey animals could breed there undisturbed. After reaching a specific number, some of them would be forced to move to the neighboring rooms, where they would become prey for the wolfs. Additionally the divers would be able to recover from the first wolf fight before moving on to the larger group of wolfs. Maybe he would plant some healing herbs later after he created some lighting.

After thinking about the 300 m² he had left to spare and the fact that he only needed 20 more life energy for the next level, he expanded the room by another 300 m².

All in all the expansion took him less than an hour. Again he was thankful for his mana gathering technique. It was almost like a cheat for a low leveled dungeon. After that he checked the mana density in the dungeon and found that it decreased a lot. That made sense after all, he more than doubled the dungeon's size and only spend a fraction of the mana he had used to create the silver.

Before moving on to the lighting issue, he decided to fill the dungeon with wolfs. Forgoing the extra life energy generation was after all out of the question. He put one of the rank F2 wolfs in the last room on his first level. After all he promised this to Luna. On the first room on the second room he put another one and two more in the last room of the second level. Then he added a F4 wolf as to floor boss to the room. The remaining five wolfs had to wait in the hidden guard room near the dungeon entrance. Next he needed some weaker wolfs the expand the packs a little bit. He visualized the F4 wolf in front of his inner eye and tried to imagine a younger version of it. Without great problems he was able to create a G-9 version of the wolf.

Young Mutated Black forest wolf Mk2

A normal forest wolf common in most temperate forests. Later mutated while being exposed to a very high mana concentration and altered by mana

Rank: G9

Traits: frenzy (rank 1); mana mutated (rank 1); mana altered (rank 1)

Costs: 100 mana ; 20 kg animal material

Content with the young wolf, he put three of them in the first room of the second level and four in the last room. On the first room divers would have the option of using the confined space of the downward slope for the fight, in the last room they would need to use the terrain against the superior numbers of the wolfs. Even a E rank diver would have a hard time if the wolf pack would be able to surround him. This design would kill off some of the stupid divers and would teach the rest not to underestimate enemies and to make a battle plan even against weaker opponents. Then he checked his status again.

Name: Neo

Species: Dungeon core

Affinity: None

Rank: F-4

Level: 4

Structural Integrity: 1/1

Mana: 1065/1065 (435)

Floor area: 1500/1500 m²

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Max dungeon extension from core: 93.7 m

Mana Regeneration: 1000 /h *50000% = 138.88 /s

Life Energy: 60.3

Life Energy generation: 3.63/d

Then he created one black bear near his core on the third level for later and then an extra of 12 F4 wolfs for the guard room. He waited with the creation of more rabbits for the first level for later. For now the mana concentration was so high, that they would just be poisoned again and die. After this, his life energy generation looked much better.

Mana: 375/375 (1125)

Life Energy generation: 9.15/d

Next was the lighting. In his mind he had different options. First he could alter a plant the be luminous and spread them all over the dungeon. The other option was to create magic lighting, preferably powered by the ambient mana, otherwise he would lose some precious mana regeneration if he had to power it himself. For a moment he thought about lighting his dungeon by creating high amounts of his mutated glowing rabbits. A dungeon lighted by rabbits would be pretty funny, but it might scare off the adventurers. They would probably fear to get mutated themselves thus he discarded the idea and started tinkering with mana lighting. Then he noticed something. Wasn't his dungeon core bigger now than when he was level 1 ? He decided to ask Luna who was playing with Mr Floppy in his core chamber.

"Luna - ... - Luna!"

  "What, why are you interrupting me, don't you see that I'm teaching Mr. Floppy valuable lessons?"

"Sorry for that, but is it possible that my core grew?"

  "Yes of course it grew. When you increase your mana capacity your core will grow. In fact, if you double your capacity, your core will double in volume!"

"What? That cannot be true, I've been to high level dungeons, they were not much bigger than I am right now. Some of them had more than 30 levels, that would mean their core would have to be gargantuan to store the billions of mana point."

  "Upps, I forgot to tell you. If you increase your mana capacity by the factor of ten, you can condense your core to half of its diameter. This is the most important step of every dungeon. A perfect core condensation can double the mana regeneration, a very bad only increases just 10% slowing down the development and decreasing the potential forever!"

"Wow, that means for a dungeon with millions of mana, that went through a couple perfect condensation, one fault and he can never gain back the ground he lost."

  "Exactly, that's why you need to be very careful with condensing your core."

"I get that, but how do I distinguish a good from a bad condensation? How do I figure out which way to proceed before my new mana regeneration shows me the result?"

  "Mmmmh, let me think about it for a moment. - All that comes to my mind, is that the bonus in regeneration is linear to the structural integrity of the dungeon core."

That helped a lot. He knew that the most stable form would normally be sphere. But his core was a crystal. It would not be good for a crystal to be a perfect sphere. He needed to keep in mind that his crystal would be growing with every level increase of his dungeon. Every crystal hat a natural form for his growth. His core had his origin in a big diamond, but he magically altered it. He needed some time to analyze the natural form of his crystal.

After a while he found that the natural form for his crystal was a octahedron. Thinking about this he came to the conclusion that an octahedron would be to delicate. He needed something with similar geometric properties that was closer to a sphere. Something more stable, that would not impact his crystal growth. Thinking about the possibilities he narrowed them down until only one was left: The regular icosahedron. Like the octahedron its faces were equilateral triangles, but its overall from was much more stable.

"Ok Luna, I found a form, what do I do now?"

  "Are you sure?"

"Yes!"

  "Ok, you have to visualize your core. Inside the core you visualize the form you want to condense to. Then you push all the mana in your core into that new form. It's important that there is no mana left outside your desired form and your mana has to be evenly spread in the new form. After that you hold your mana in place. It will take some time, but your core will slowly adjust to the mana distribution. Once you start, you cannot pause or stop, otherwise your new form is only halfway finished and you get a bad condensation result."

"Good, thanks for the explanation. I will start condensing now."

  "Good luck and don't fuck up, for both of our future!"

"Ok, I will keep that in mind."

With this Neo started. First he visualized his current form, then a regular icosahedron, then some ledger lines to help him optimizing the positioning of his new form inside the old one. After that he removed the ledger lines and focused on his mana. Slowly he guided it to the new form. After his whole mana was inside his desired form, he concentrated on the distribution and evened the mana out. It was difficult, but his knowledge in geometry was helping a lot. After this was done, all that was left was to keep up his focus, which after a while was far more taxing than the first steps of the way.