Mana. Mana is a powerful energy that empowers every aspect of existence. From the benevolent Stars that shield the Planes from the void, to the very void itself. Mana is neither evil nor good, it simply is. Like a force of nature or a law of physics. As mana empowers the things it touches, it too is changed by those things. This is where Affinities come from.

An affinity is essentially mana that has been flavored by a concept. This change in the mana helps to increase the mana’s efficiency when interacting with those concepts, thus creating a feedback loop until the only types of mana that work are ones flavored by that concept. Fire mana cannot grow a plant, but it can certainly increase the temperature in a room. Knowledge of affinities is important since it helps to lay the foundations of the principle of . . .

* Arkham Ever, the last Telminar Archmage, from his book ‘Theories of Magic and Mana’

Eternal Dungeon POV

Before I start adding too much I should first pick out my new perks just so that I have all the tools possible to make this floor as good as it should be. It is supposed to cover the rest of the level gap until One Star after all.

Fortunately there is little need to debate as I’m already pretty sure of what I’m going to be taking. I already know which of the Lesser perks I want to pursue and I know that my Greater perk is going to be a new affinity. The only thing I need to finalize is which Superior perk I plan on taking.

Lesser Perk: Enhanced Capacity 1

Increases your dungeon creature level cap by 5%

Enhanced Capacity makes more sense to take now rather than Enhanced Empowerment. From what I’ve seen my perks are able to work retroactively in most situations so I’m not missing out on anything by waiting to take Enhanced Empowerment. Plus I still only have a few dungeon creatures (Spiritkin excluded) that have managed to get Empowerments for themselves. I suspect that as I get more familiar with Adventurers who use Empowerments I’ll be able to learn more about them and help my creatures get them.

Greater Perk: Dark Affinity

Gain access to Dark Affinity Mana and Dark Magic

10% Increase in mana potency to all dungeon creatures and objects that use the Dark affinity

15% Increase in experience gained to all creatures with a matching affinity while inside your dungeon

I picked Dark first simply because it's an affinity that a sizable number of my creatures have naturally acquired. While I am unable to give anything an affinity I don’t have, nothing stops them from evolving that affinity by themselves (other than the fact that my aura has far less of it than other types). I wanted to make sure to grab Dark so that the creatures that have evolved the affinity can continue growing it without my lack of it slowing them down.

I still have no dungeon creatures that use the Light or Scourge elements. The first makes sense since despite my fake suns, my dungeon is still underground. However Scourge is supposed to be the death element and there is plenty of that happening, so either my theory is wrong or my understanding of affinities is wrong. It’s possible that it's simply difficult for living creatures to bond with the two elements without some kind of outstanding circumstance helping them.

I already planned on grabbing Scourge as my last affinity, simply because of how hated it is by current human society. Also I want to see if having Light’s counterpart will change anything about how the affinity interacts with my dungeon aura. Perhaps by increasing the amount of Dark mana in my dungeon, light mana might naturally move to balance it out.

I have no idea and I can’t wait to find out!

Superior Perk: Aspect of All

Aspect of All absorbs all other aspect types and brings them under its fold. Superior Perk Points may be used to either add new Aspects or to increase the base bonus of Aspect of All

Base Bonus: 20% to mana potency and experience

Aspect of Beasts: 5% Bonus to Aspect of All

Aspect of Wyrm: 10% Bonus to Aspect of All

Aspect of Spiritkin (*Special): *20% Bonus to Aspect of All

Aspect of Plants: 5% Bonus to Aspect of All

Total Bonus: 60% to mana potency and experience

I used my Superior Perk to add Plants as an Aspect. I had been intending to do it to see if it would enhance Wyla at all. I also have been noticing the usefulness of having dangerous flora in addition to my fauna. It’s likely that the fifth floor will be one of the deadliest once people start exploring it.

I was tempted to take Goblinoids as an Aspect, but I want to have a baseline creature to see how much the Aspect actually helps them. It’s one thing to see the numbers on the screen, but I’ve been learning that the actual effects can be different. Knowing how the perk is applying could help me understand more of what the actual mana is doing to their bodies.

With all that out of the way it's time to actually start furnishing my new super floor!

I have a massive bank of blueprints for hundreds of plants and animals and it keeps growing every day. The first thing I should do is seed the floor with the species that I already have and let natural selection do the rest. The magical biomes should help to shape what creatures live and die based on what’s best for the biome.

I start pulling from the massive reservoir of mana that has built up within my core. Using the mana to fill every single magical biome with all different variants of both plants and animals that I have available. The only things I don’t include are variants that I know won’t do well, such as a winter adapted wolf in the middle of the desert or a giant elk in the ocean. Although It would be interesting to see how they fare, it's more likely that they’ll die without my intervention.

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Besides this is just the first batch. I plan on handcrafting a few creatures for this floor once I get a better idea of how each biome interacts with living things. But before I start handcrafting creatures, I first want to handicraft some special features for the floor. Something that’s been missing from previous floors due to their more limited size.

There’s a wide variety of different areas to build in and I don’t want to overcrowd any single one of them. To start with I create a layout of roads that will link up massive sections of the floor, including bridges and tunnels that cleanly navigate through the rougher terrain. This is important because I plan on having a much more developed civilization on this floor.

I mark out areas along my road network for towns and villages and create a much larger area for the single central city that will be built around Wyla’s Trunk. Every hub floor will contain a massive city built around Wyla’s trunk to function as a centralized area of activity on the floor.

Speaking of Wyla, the loud rumbling and sounds of splitting wood inform me that she has already started the process of growing herself downwards into the new floor. Thanks to her newfound awareness I no longer have to help her to grow downwards. All I needed to do was move the dungeon stone out of the way and she was able to do the rest.

I watch with childlike wonder as her massive trunk grows downwards, gaining more diameter as it slowly descends. Eventually it touches down onto the soil with a low thudding sound, like a giant stomp. The soil itself is barely disturbed by her actions, that is until her roots start penetrating even deeper into the earth.

Dirt, rock, and stone are all forced out of the way as her massive tap root and thousands of smaller roots branch out into soil. Her roots go far deeper than a normal tree’s would do to the fact that she seeks not nutrients, but mana. Mana is found in higher concentration the closer to the World Core one gets, so deeper is better.

It takes barely half an hour before she reaches the bottom of the dungeon again, her roots once again restricted by the dungeon stone. While her roots had spread to cover the entire bottom of the dungeon, her branches spread themselves out in the sky. The much larger area of the floor means that the ‘sky’ is also higher. For once Wyla’s Branches are actually above the artificial sun of this floor, well some of them are anyway.

Once she’s fully grown into the floor, Wyla begins to link herself with every single plant on the floor. We had already agreed beforehand that she wouldn’t help any of the plants yet, at least not until they had had proper time to evolve on the floor. She decided to link up with them anyway since being connected to them should give us more in depth data on the plant life and how it's adapting.

I break myself away from watching my partner as her work shifts from rapid growth to more tedious checkups on the local wildlife. I return my attention to the task I was originally doing before becoming distracted.

With Wyla now in place I’m free to start building up the central city around her trunk. Her trunk has grown massively and could now have its diameter measured in thousands of feet instead of hundreds. If this trend continues then in a few floors the entire city will be inside of her trunk instead of just around it.

Due to her much larger size I start the city off by placing a single central plaza within Wyla’s trunk and then create four large roads leading in each cardinal direction. The roads exit Wyla’s Trunk and continue outwards until they meet up with the road network I had constructed earlier.

With the main roads in place I then begin to create branches that will connect the entire city together. I don’t quite go for the modern system of blocks and roads as it kinda kills the fantasy vibe. Instead I create a more natural flow. I make it appear as though the city was built from the main roads and Wyla and then connected together, as opposed to the other way around.

Now that the roads and paths of my city are in place I begin to create the buildings. I utilize the Japanese inspired fantasy style that my Spiritkin developed. I use wood, tile, and paper as my primary construction materials. Creating everything out of dungeon materials that I already have. Ancient Oaks make for a wood and paper house that’s as resilient as steel. I use clay from my fourth floor, which has been imbued with massive amounts of earth and fire mana, to create the tiles. The end result is roof tiles that are incredibly strong and also absorb heat to change their color based on the ambient temperature.

I create dozens of buildings until a single layer of the city has been completed. I only make a single ring of buildings around Wyla. Along with several more buildings built directly into the side of Wyla’s trunk, a feat that required consent from my partner and a liberal use of wyld magic to shape living wood.

I decide to leave 90% of the city unfinished as I want to let my Spiritkin build it themselves this time. I placed the roads in to help give them an idea of where I want buildings to be, but that's the only instruction I’m going to give them.

With my central city done (at least with my part of it done) I move on to the rest of the floor. The first thing I do is create a large obelisk of neutral mana crystal. Mana crystals normally end up growing with some kind of affinity due to the imbalances of whatever their environment is, most often an earth affinity. A neutral mana crystal has pure mana in it with no affinity whatsoever, it is also perfectly clear with only a slight tint of blue. The books on mana that have been `donated` all said that pure mana doesn’t have a color and instead appears however its observer thinks it should appear.

I guess I think pure mana is blue, probably due to all of the video games back on earth that use blue as the magic color.

I take my obelisk of mana crystal and begin to layer on enchantments. Most of the enchantments are meaningless fluff so that any observing adventurer will have no idea what these do. The only actual enchantments I placed on it are ones for durability and concealment. The real magic will be done by dungeon rules that I will attach to the obelisk.

I begin shaping an elaborate set of rules to create a new dungeon mechanic. The basic idea of it is that I want to create multiple smaller towns and villages across the floor, but I don’t want all of them to get along with adventurers. So I plan on placing a town ward (what I’m calling the enchanted obelisks) in each part of my road network where I want there to be a settlement. The obelisks will then allow any partially or fully sapient dungeon creature to claim it and build a settlement there.

In order to incentivize my creatures I’m only guaranteeing the safety of constructions protected by a town ward. Meaning that I’ll use my dungeon powers to protect and restore anything built within the town ward, anything outside of a town ward’s protection can be destroyed by both other dungeon creatures and by adventurers. In addition the owners of a town ward will get to set permissions for entry as well as their own laws, which the dungeon will help enforce. Finally other dungeon creatures can always attack the settlement to attempt to take it over, which should lead to some interesting events.

With my town ward complete I immediately duplicate it dozens of times and send a single one to each point of the road network that will have a settlement. I also place a couple of them disconnected in wilder area’s to create some hidden settlements that won’t appear on the map.

With that complete the final thing I do is open up the floor to the Spiritkin so that they can choose to migrate downwards or not. I also open up the floor for any creatures who have reached their level caps to migrate downwards, the exact same way I did previously for the first floor. The only rule is that any dungeon creature that descends floors can never go up again, the only exception being my Chosen.

With all that set into motion I can now dedicate my attention to adding a few special features across the floor and once that’s done I can start working on some custom creatures. Hopefully the high time dilation of the sixth floor will have sorted out the biomes by then and I’ll have a more stable environment to use.