Chapter 13 - The work never stops

Day 15

After the boy left, Neo thought about what Mike told him. It would really be difficult to find rare animals and suicide to attack a group of goblins alone. For a moment he contemplated lending out one of his golems, they listened to voice commands after all. But that would be risky. While he didn't think that the boy would betray him, if somebody came across him by chance, it would lead to dangerous questions. He would've to be very unlucky for it to happen, but if the B ranked golem could be tracked back to his new dungeon, somebody would probably decide to kill him, just to be safe from an abnormal dungeon.

His best bet would be the sensor array. If he could provide real time surveillance, Mike would be able to easiely ambush a goblin or surprise an animal while it was asleep. He thought about the requirements an item for this purpose would have to fulfill. First of all, it needed to be controlled by the mind, secondly a projector was needed. Transmitting the information directly to the mind would be to complex and the third issue was Mike's lack of mana. The device needed a mana battery with enough power for a few days. He went to the stuff he brought with him from his tower in his mind. He could use the control and the projector design from the old array controller. He just needed to downgrade it a little bit so he could use more basic materials and lowered the energy consumption. Additionally the device should be only able to connect to the part of the sensor array near the dungeon for safety reasons. For the battery he would use a little bit of crystal from his old formation together with some silver and steel. Normally this kind of crystal was way too valuable for a simple device like this, but for now he had no alternatives. Being a master artificer he was finished with the device after three hours. The result was a steel wrist protector embedded with a small crystal on the inside. It looked pretty normal and would not attract some unwanted attention. After finishing he had a look at his newest creature.

Dear

A normal dear

Rank: G5

Traits:

Costs: 60 mana ; 30 kg animal material

With this and the badger he finally had some prey for his wolves. First he created some lighting all over his dark caverns. Then he spread some plants over the first two levels. For his first floor he only used grass and fungus due to the small room sizes. On the second floor he added some bushes. The ceilings were not height enough for trees so that was the best he could do for now.

With a floor size of a bit over 1000 m² his second floor was a little bit tiny for a real ecosystem. He could expand the third floor to a similar size, but for now that would not gain him anything. There were no visitors for his dungeon at the moment, even if he would be discovered right now, a small third floor would not do much. He decided to open up two more floors and moving his core down. He used longer slopes this time and extended the walking distance from the end of the second floor to his core to 500 meters. This would buy him some additional time in case of emergency. With what was left he doubled the size of the three rooms on his second floor.

After the expansion was finished, Neo went over his dungeon room by room. On the first and second floor he was not happy with the shabby dirt walls and ceiling. He decided to use some of the granite he absorbed when he created the fourth and fifth floor. It was not much, but at least he could put a five cm strong layer of stone over the dirt. Additionally he separated his guard room from the entrance with a one cm layer of stone. He put in some well concealed holes for ventilation.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

Plants in a dungeon were growing a lot faster than on the outside. He calculated a little bit how much animals his second floor could support and went for 25 deer and 25 badgers. They would breed and if there more than thirty of one species, he would allow some of them to leave the safe room to be killed by wolves. Hits should help his predators grow and should deliver him a steady supply of animal material. In the first two rooms on the first floor the spawned 20 rabbits, just for the ambiance. The big bad wolf would not be able to reach them. When he saw how much unblocked mana he had left, he brought the number of his bears to ten and put nine of them to sleep in the hallways of the third, fourth and fifth floor. The last bear went to the wolves into the guard room . Thereafter  he had a look at his status.

Name: Neo

Species: Dungeon core

Affinity: None

Rank: F-8

Level: 5

Structural Integrity: 4/4

Mana: 905/905 (2195)

Floor area: 3100/3100 m²

Max dungeon extension from core: 124 m

Mana Regeneration: 1500 /h *2*50000% = 416.66 /s

Life Energy: 40.8

Life Energy generation: 18.21/d

It would take more than six days to be able to level up again. He hoped for Mike to hurry and bring in some good prey. The extra space was really needed. He had now ten bears and more than ten wolves just idling around to generate life energy. He needed more space to expand.

He decided that he needed to get life energy faster, he had more than 900 unlocked mana, that was more than he needed. If he really needed to free up mana later, he could just have some wolves kill each other. Thus he decided to create 80 young wolves to increase his life energy generation, only to find out that he was out of animal material.

Animal material: 5 kg

Plant material: 782 kg

When he checked his stats, he saw that he was pretty low on plant material to. His high generation was seriously unbalancing his development. A normal dungeon would spend days for his expansion while his animals and plants could grow and provide more material.

"Luna, is it possible to generate animal material?"

  "Yes, you can convert plant material but it is very mana intensive."

"What about plant material?"

  "You cannot directly create it, but you can directly infuse mana into plants to speed up their growth!"

"Thank you for the information. For now I cannot use a lot mana anyways. Otherwise our creatures die again."

After their conversation Neo contemplated over his next steps. He came to the conclusion that the most important issue right now would be to unlock to full potential of his mana regeneration without killing all his creatures.

He still had the crystal and precious metals from his old formation. Additionally he had the empty lapatronic crystals, in which he would be able to store gargantuan amounts of mana. The only problem was their value. Sooner or later there would be adventurers in his dungeon. At least in the beginning some of them would be able to reach the core. Usually the guild is sending an exploration team to a new found dungeon. These teams would be at least at the B rank, there was nothing he would be able to do to prevent them from entering his core room. If they found crystals that were unobtainable for SSS adventurers, this news would spread like a wildfire and he would gather a lot of unwanted attention.

After pondering over this problem he decided to take a loss in the efficiency of the formation and hide it in the floor around his core. Then he absorbed some of the stone around his core and began designing the formation. For the formation to work, it had to create a bubble around his core and only allow a part the mana radiation from his core to pass. The rest needed to be stored in the crystals. The capacity would not be an issue for now. Each crystal was able to store one trillion mana. He never build this kind of formation so it would probably take a while.

"Luna, I will start to develop a formation that reduces the mana radiation in the dungeon. In the meanwhile maybe you can think about stuff you want to have or need to be created. Maybe a bed or something. - ........ - Did you hear me?"

  "Oh yes sure, a bed or something. Was that all? I'm busy."