Eternal Dungeon POV

It was time for floor number 3, well kind of. I had planned to make my floors in batches with a large central floor connected to other ones in its batch. My first grouping would be floors 2,3,4, and 5. I already had the central floor, floor 2, prepared. So I was now going to work on the first expansion floor, floor 3. I wanted kobolds as my monsters for this for a few reasons: One they’re just classic dungeon crawl monsters. This leads into Two, I planned on making this expansion floor a more traditional dungeon. Finally Three, by using kobolds I would set myself up for having a dragon-like Wyrm as the Boss.

I planned on making the third floor entrance a cave in the mountains at the edge of the Borderlands on the second floor. The barrier for entry would be to beat the Royal Woods boss event. I had already set this mechanic up using the integrated progression tracker so that anyone who beats a boss before its unlock is ready doesn’t have to kill it a second time just to get a key. I planned on gating floors 4 and 5 with the bosses of the east and south and using my strongest boss, the Eternal Prowler, the Boss of the North as the key to progress downwards. Still this was all in the future for now, but with my leveling speed It was something I needed to consider. I rallied my thoughts back on track, I had a dungeon to make.

I planned on making the third floor a multilevel dungeon that starts out as an abandoned mine before transitioning into natural caves. It will be the first place in my dungeon to have proper traps as well as treasure chests and other things, it will effectively be a `normal` dungeon within my dungeon. I had already dug out the space, so step one was the tedious multi-hour process of spatial expansion. I didn’t need it that much bigger, just bigger than it was. I planned on having 10 levels to the 3rd floor dungeon with a boss on level 10 and a sub boss on level 5. I might also throw in some mini-bosses and elites but those would likely come about more organically during the actual build phase. I knew that I wanted each level to be reasonably large so that I would have plenty of room to create mazes of tunnels and open caverns where ambushes can happen. With the rough size required being several cubic miles in volume I began to spatially expand the space I had dug out. I made sure the whole thing was made of a dungeon stone exterior and then started the mind numbing task of repeatedly making little loops of Aether mana and linking them together.

It took me only 2 hours this time since I didn’t need as much space as the central floor required. I wanted to make sure there were proper checkpoints in the dungeon so I needed to leave enough room at the entry to perform teleportations in and out. With my newly enlarged space created I went about filling it with stone. Once that was done I carved out a massive tunnel network, starting more defined and man-made at the start and becoming far more natural the deeper in you go. I ensured that there were several large open caverns within the natural spaces to create more open areas where different types of monsters could be prevalent. I also created a single drop shaft which was placed roughly in the center of the 3rd floor and went down through all 10 levels. I planned on creating special environmental hazards for anyone who decided they wanted to try and skip past the layers of the 3rd floor.

Next I began to seed the tunnels and caverns with various ore and mineral deposits that I had received from either my own aura expansion or from the offering altar. I made sure to organize everything so that the deeper one goes, the better and more frequent the resources one can find. At the very bottom of the drop shaft, where I planned on placing the boss room, I made sure there was a large vein of Mithril. The magical metal was used in many magical artifacts, almost like copper in wires or gold in circuit boards. Large quantities of it were needed to create the highest level items that I had seen. The metal was also used as the highest form of local currency, a single mithril coin was worth 100 platinum ones. With the `naturally` occurring loot of the 3rd floor created I moved on to finishing out the rest of the natural features. A water source was added creating several flooded areas as well as making the caverns more hospitable to life. I made sure that all the water eventually flows into and down the drop shaft spilling into a deep pool at the bottom. The pool at the bottom of the drop shaft was around 80 feet deep with shelves of rock cleared out to create space above the water line. Anyone who wanted the mithril deposit would need to brave the water pressure, the darkness, and the cold to get it. I made sure that a few bits of mithril poked up above the surface to hint at what lay deeper below.

Next I moved on to the less natural features. I started by using Greater Ancient Oak to make large supports for the walls of the tunnels. I spread out these supports among the top 3 levels of the tunnels creating the appearance of a proper mineshaft. I then make several iron and glass lamps that house endlessly burning flames inside them for light. I would have had to make these myself but thankfully my Spiritkin had done that for me. Ever since they chose their roles, I started giving them special role tasks that required them to make things for my dungeon that I hadn’t absorbed yet. I wasn’t even sure it would work until the first swords, armor, and tools started being offered to me by my dungeon denizens. This created a positive feedback loop where I gain more knowledge about the items from absorbing them which can then be transferred into my Spiritkin to give them more knowledge of how to craft better. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to make superior or maybe even legendary items with enough time.

Anyways, with my mine supports and lights created I moved on to making a few rooms. I created rest areas where miners might have taken breaks and junctions where carts would’ve been loaded with material going out. I realized I was missing a basic rail system for minecarts, so I made one of those as well. Once I was finished the top 3 levels looked like a properly created mine. The man-made shafts and rooms then slowly lower in number until it all blends away into the natural cave systems. With that done I slowly age everything until supports begin to show signs of rot and mold and iron rails show the reddish hue of rust. I add old signs of struggle and blood and strategically place weathered bones to weave together the story I wish to tell. A story of ambitious miners who dug deeper and deeper until they hit a pre-existing subterranean world and then were forced to flee or die by what was contained within these ancient caverns. I completed my story by making a `Do Not Enter: Monsters Inside` sign that I placed over a boarded up entrance to the third floor.

I diverted a piece of my mind to work on creating a questline that would become available to any who beat the Royal Woods event and allow them to unlock the 3rd floor. With that being taken care of I moved the majority of my thoughts towards the continual creation of my 3rd floor. I had all the set pieces in place, it was time for some flora and then fauna.

Flora comes first. I create a wide array of mosses, lichens, and fungi that will fill out the musty and dank tunnels of this floor. I make sure to place them in such a way so that it appears that the growth is slowly creeping into the abandoned mine. Next I move over to the caverns and natural formations of the rock, as well as the large open drop shaft, and I create ferns as well as low growing grasses. I find several trees which I give the bonsai treatment, shrinking their overall size so that they grow nicely into the caverns and drop shaft without overtaking the scenery. I made certain that the drop shaft had several small cliffs and alcoves to accommodate hanging plant life in its large vertical space, I create several varieties of hanging flowers and vines which droop down the drop shaft and absorb the plentiful water coming from falls that cascade down from all the tunnels. I leave enough room in the drop shaft to grow several of my newly miniaturized trees to add plantlife that grows both upwards and downwards. My caverns and tunnels were now lush with vibrant greenery in the lower levels, life that slowly became less and less prosperous the closer to the entrance you get. Being able to look at it from the side let me see a beautiful gradient of vibrant green to bland gray with speckles of red, orange, violet, yellow, and blue thrown in from the more colorful flora. It made the entire natural cave system feel like a completely new world.

Having successfully captured the majesty of a magical subterranean world, I moved on to the final piece of the puzzle fauna. I started simple with the microfauna insects and invertebrates of various varieties that would fill in the bottom most layer of the food chain as well as function as a cleanup crew for the rot that the humid environment promoted. (As a dungeon I could just automatically clean up any non-living things but I preferred the active ecosystem and only used my dungeon abilities to insure its stability.) With the micro fauna in place I slowly moved up in both the size of the creatures and their place on the food chain. I made moles, mice, and rats. I created several bat colonies as well as groups of smaller birds that would be able to fly inside the drop shaft and open caverns. With all that complete I added a few larger creatures that would only be able to survive in the caverns and then I prepared to make my Kobolds and Wyrms.

For Kobolds I started with a goblin as a base but lowered the strength and vitality to increase the dexterity and intelligence. Next it was time to juice them up with wyrm blood. I had picked wyrms specifically because of what I detected within my aura. There was a small flock of wyvern led by a Wind Scythe Wyrm (Superior) at the top of one of the cliffs above my dungeon. I was completely unable to sight copy a superior ranked creature using the edges of my aura which meant I needed to give out a special little quest. I had used my aura to pick up all the details on the Wyrm and its flock from levels to ranks to even any abilities I witnessed them used. Then all I had to do was place the quest up on the board in a prominent location and with a special reward.

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Special Quest: Retrieve the Wyrm

Lord Eternal requires the body of the Wyrm who nests within the peaks above. The reward for the successful retrieval of this beast is 10,000 EC with an extra reward of 3,000 EC for the retrieval of a Wyvern Corpse. The details of the monsters and a map to their nest will be distributed along with the quest.

When Adventurers had seen this on the quest board they had some strange reactions, but despite my initial worries that my poor level 20-30 adventurers wouldn’t be able to handle a level 42 Superior Wyrm they somehow managed. The group that turned in the quest were all just non-combatant guild functionaries that had been carried through the first floor in preparation for them moving into the second floor Guild hall (once it gets established). My guess is that the guild had someone either level appropriate or vastly overleveled kill the Wyrm and Wyverns in order to complete my quest. This guess is further reinforced by the fact that after turning in the quest the first thing they did with the money was buy a large space on the interior of Wyla. I hadn’t introduced the integrated features for making guilds yet because they weren’t ready, but I’m pretty sure I know what the first guild will be once I finish the feature.

Now, with my kobolds rough template made and the wyrm blood injected into them in various amounts and qualities, it was time for some time accelerated evolution. I tossed in my experimental kobolds and turned up the time dilation, this time I placed a firm mana limit on what the spell could actively draw from me so that I wouldn’t be incapacitated again. I also didn’t want it eating into the 1.7 million mana I had been carefully banking for when I wanted to try my hand at creating a more powerful creature. With the time dilation in full swing and my ecosystem under rapid evolution I moved on to work on the Wyrm Boss I planned on creating. Step one: a wyrm. I simply created a Wind Scythe Wyrm but stripped away all of its affinity to leave me with a mostly blank slate. The result was a predictable Scythe Wyrm (Greater), I assumed the rank would drop considering how much of the creature's mana was allocated to its affinity powers. Step two: I made two copies of my blank slate wyrm and then pumped one of them full of Aether mana, one full of Wyld mana, and the last a half-and-half mix of both Aether and Wyld. The first two turned out alright simply replacing the wind affinity with the new type and becoming Superior rank creatures again. The last one had some trouble, in that it exploded violently sending guts and gore shooting across my experiment chamber. I refused to be cowed by this and doubled down on the experiment creating several dozen of the blank slate wyrms and flooding them with all sorts of variations in the ratio of Aether to Wyld mana.

It took me 3 hours of dedicated experimentation to finally learn what was wrong with my mixture. The Wyrms had a different biology than the beasts I’ve worked with up until now. I didn’t realize that different creatures processed their mana in different ways, something that seemed obvious in hindsight. What made Wyrms so powerful was that they directly incorporated mana into every facet of their biology, relying heavily on it to make up for what would be flaws in a normal non-magical creature. That’s why there were no mundane rank Wyrms and why their innate magic was so powerful compared to creatures of the same rank as them. The problem I was having was that every other creature used some form of core to process and contain their mana before distributing it throughout their bodies, whereas Wyrms contained their mana in every individual cell of their body. This turned their entire bodies into a giant mana core as well as a massive conduit for their own mana. This led to issues when they had two separate types of mana inside them that wouldn’t mix. The mana would clash and cause the Wyrm to violently explode as all the mana tried to escape its close confines with the other mana types. What I learned from all this is that Wyrms can only have a single affinity, no matter what affinity it is, all their mana must be blended together. I was forced to give up on an Aether/Wyld Wyrm for now as Aether and Wyld had no confluence affinities like some other mixtures did, it was impossible to blend the two affinities together by themselves.

Since I couldn’t have a single Wyrm boss with both of my current affinities I decided to simply have a special Wyrm boss that would `swap` between Wyld and Aether. I set up a special isolated room and warded it from any teleportation not performed by my dungeon magic. Then I created a system by which the Wyld and Aether Wyrms could seamlessly swap places with one another creating a boss that had double the effective health and twice the amount of abilities. I placed their lair on a ledge at the very bottom of the drop shaft, they would be the final boss of the third floor. Speaking of, I needed a proper name for this floor since it was going to be an extension off of the 2nd floor.

Name, name, what would be a good name for a deadly cavern system filled with Wyrm blooded creatures? Wyrms? Wyrms? The scales of my Wyld Scythe Wyrm remind me of the look of raw mithril hmmm. . . . I think that the Wyrmscale Caverns would fit, at least for the second half of the floor; I decided to name the floor in two parts. The second zone within levels 6-10 of the floor would be the Wyrmscale Caverns and the first zone within levels 1-5 of the floor would be the Lost Mine. They were simple names and the Wyrmscale Caverns was a bit on the nose, but I didn’t mind. It was important for the names of places to tell you about them, like the cover and title of a book. With that decided I updated the automatic map system and moved on, I had planned for a big part of this floor to be the ability of the adventurers to map it out themselves, the Spiritkin would only have a few notable locations and names that could be learned about ahead of time. Things would appear on the map as the adventurers explored them and some areas would only appear after they were considered `conquered`.

With that finished I checked in on my 3rd floor again to see the progress of my time dilated evolution. I found that a lot had changed. Things had grown into the floor more naturally and some areas were now even overgrown with others being undergrown, my guess is that it has to do with the migration patterns of the newly evolved creatures I have. Enormous Aphid (Lesser) were a new grazer that seemed to be able to decimate plant life, that is if everything in the caverns didn’t hunt them. They had a life cycle where they spawned from their eggs, cleared out a cavern of all life, then laid a bunch of eggs in the soil, before finally inevitably dying to either predation or starvation. The timing on the eggs seemed designed in such a way that 2-3 caverns would always be in each cycle of the Enormous Aphids life, this created migration patterns where their predators would need to traverse from cave to cave. These migrations, mainly of bats, then fed many of the creatures who lived within the tunnels. This created a fascination dynamic within the ecosystem that I would have to study closer later.

I scanned my attention searching for my kobolds until I finally found what was left of my experiments. It seemed that about 70% of them had reverted to a more bestial form, 15% had simply died off in the competition that is life, but the last of them managed to become something I was quite happy with. They resembled what I would think of as kobolds: scales covering their bodies in a variety of different colors designed to help them blend in with whatever surrounds they happen to live in; Faces like a stubby crocodile with forwards facing eyes placed high upon their heads and pointed teeth barely poking out of the side of their jaws; 4 fingered hands with short yet sharp claws on the end of each digit as well as raptor like legs with only 3 toes on the feet that each end in a longer yet dulled claw, designed to provide traction instead of cutting up flesh. I went in and manually smoothed out a few minor design issues such as misshapen scales or birth defects that led to stunted growth. Overall I ended up with 4 foot tall reptilian humanoids that had a surprising amount of intelligence and dexterity. They already had created basic stone tools and weapons for themselves so I decided to cement their place by absorbing one of them for the blueprint and then giving the rest metal tools and weapons. I cleared out all of the failures that were left, excluding a few interesting specimens that had truly devolved back into lizards. I then filled up the various levels of the floor with them and allowed them to naturally form groups among themselves. I gave a few overarching orders and created several altars that would allow a set number of kobolds to respawn. I designed this mechanic in such a way that the kobolds would need to fight for a place within the ranks of the Eternal, making it so that only the most powerful or prized of their number would be able to respawn. This was an honor since up until now the only things that could respawn were Bosses and Spiritkin, my hope was that by doing this I could encourage some members of the species to evolve further into more powerful creatures which I could then use in later floors.

With my final task complete I returned the floor to a normal time flow and finished going over all the various new evolutions and making sure I had absorbed one for my growing library of creatures blueprints. I went about making various final touches and working on new quests before finalizing everything and opening the floor. Of course to enter it someone would have to beat the Royal Woods Boss Event, but there was a particular party that was well on their way to that goal. I set a part of my attention to watch them while the rest worked on my ever changing list of projects and tasks.

Wyrm POV

The great one has brought us new life. We are no longer a lone existence at the peak of our flock. Now we are two halves split in mind, body, and mana, yet bound by soul. We wander our new domain given to us to protect by the great one, the Lord Eternal. He is indeed great, for what other thing could you call a being which has domain over life itself. We would ponder this question, perhaps a better title could be given to our new master. While one half ponders the other wanders, searching for suitable nesting materials for the new lair. The half finds what it's looking for protected by a strain of lesser kin, as the half approaches all the lesser kin begin to bow and scrape at its feet. This pleases us, the master has created servants for our new lair. We immediately rally them, delivering our orders and edicts. The shiniest of things are to be collected for the lair whether they are mined from the walls or taken from the intruders. The lesser kin begin to spread themselves out preparing to deliver our order to the many tribes of my new domain. I make sure to have both halves release a powerful roar in order to add weight to the orders they bring, we shall allow no defiance among our servants. With the shinies on their way both halves reconvene in the lair, it is time to sleep, to grow, to wait for those who would dare to intrude upon the master's domain.