Well, that was...an experience! First things first, no idea what they were saying, and not just because they were speaking a different language. It was like there was something missing when they were speaking to each other, and I just couldn’t process their words. There were only two times that I got some actual clarity, which is when those hardlight scrolls popped up in front of each of them, and that weird ritual thing at the end of their visit.
The scrolls each had little flairs to them, seemingly based on each of them. The rogue’s scroll looked like it was made of steel and parchment, the warriors looked like it had some stains on it, and the elf person seemed to have one made entirely of a roll of bark. They all said the same thing though, written in actual english, which I could only assume meant that they somehow translated into whatever the observer was used to. Apparently people got a ‘boon’ as soon as they entered my area of influence? Definitely something to keep in mind for the future.
The ritual though, that was more interesting. I still couldn’t figure out what exactly they were saying, but I could feel the intent behind the words, an odd mix of excitement, solemnity, and anticipation. Once they all stepped out of my sphere of influence, my control over my roots snapped back into place, all of the mana they’d left behind quickly getting processed. That’s definitely a weird reaction...maybe the humanoids themselves cause the inactivity? I didn’t feel any particular problems though, I just stopped being able to affect things.
Enough recollection though! I was expecting to have at least some time before having to defend myself, and I know for a fact that less scrupulous individuals will want to either destroy me, or hold me hostage to force me to make things for them. What I need to decide, here and now, is where I want to take my dungeon. What is most important to me? First off, I refuse to kill without reason. Obviously if someone’s trying to actually come after my core, I’m going to defend it, but I don’t want to stop being empathetic of others. I was human, and I will stay human at my core (ha!).
So, I need to figure out how to defend myself in mostly non-deadly manners. Considering the state of my creatures, that means traps for now. And the offerings given to me may just be pivotal on that front. The rat tail and talisman necklace are great for adding some more mid-level animals to my ecology, but the stone is the big catch, because it’s enchanted!
Now, I had been doing stuff like the verdant sand (which had, in fact, slightly increased the growth speed of the water plants), but that was completely passive. This light stone, once I absorbed it, showed me how to set up what were essentially magic functions. For example, the stone-quartzite mineral, artificially uniform structure-has a kind of neutral mana I hadn’t seen before threaded through the structure, forming a somewhat basic weave of magic that’s a cross between a spider’s web and circuitry.
Using dungeon-fu, I easily make a copy of the enchantment and examine it, looking over its functions and triggers. In simple terms, the enchantment stays static until something is placed through the hole in the middle of the stone. When something is, it triggers a minute observational field in the hole, exciting the rest of the enchantment and making the atoms give off light, using mana as fuel. Basically, a longer, fancier way of saying they made a magic flashlight.
With this new knowledge, and the proverbial fire lit under my ass from knowing I’ll probably be getting a lot more visitors soon, I get to work renovating. I burrow my roots into the back wall of my cave, the thicker ones staying ahead of the smaller ones, which dissolves the stone as they’re pulled back with the larger ones. With the new space, my root system grows larger to fill in the gaps, my core floating back as the wall recesses more and more until I have a good sized tunnel, a good 100 feet long.
With the new space, I find several more cracks letting loose more water, which is slightly concerning for tunnel stability, but with some more reinforced columnar basalt, that problem goes away. Rather than have multiple little streams, I reroute all of them to the middle of my rapidly growing pond, the now much larger space filling up with more water. With the pond now filling up most of the front half of the corridor, I deepen the channel letting the water out of my cave.
The pond area is now the entire width of the dungeon, making it seemingly impossible to traverse without swimming. A singular column made of seven basalt columns sprouts up out of the water, the middle one going all the way to the ceiling and into the channel for the water, each of the outer ring of columns getting lower in a circular pattern, allowing the waterfall to glide from one pillar to the next without making too much racket. Embedded into the columns are dustings of purple, blue, and white crystal and metal, each tiny piece enchanted to glow with a soft light, the specific light level always shifting and twinkling. It bounces off of the condensation on the walls, and reflects off of the water to create multicolored ripples on the ceiling, creating a very cool effect.
Next, the big project. Once the water level in the deep pond section is stable, I raise a variety of completely dark basalt pillars up in the water, the dark color making the person-width pillars near invisible. I raise them so that there’s just a tiny amount of water covering the top of each column, and start threading the neutral ‘Info’ mana through each of them, along with most of the rest of this section. It takes some experimentation, but after some time I get a quite cool puzzle-trap for people to get through.
A massive observational barrier covers the corridor just before the deep pond area, which triggers the puzzle. On the main waterfall column, a set of slightly larger ‘stars’ will light up brighter than usual, creating a constellation that any intruders can see. Lighting up in time with the constellation is a copy on the ceiling, which light up purple and shine down on the pond, directly above where the pillars to walk on are. The visitors have to make small jumps from one pillar to the next, either in time with the constellation, or by memorizing where they are.
With the puzzle done, all I need to do is make some actual danger, to keep people from just swimming through it and ignoring the challenge. First, I hybridize a new variant of the Lakelurker Grass, the pseudo-seaweed I’d made. This new species, the Black Tangler, takes some traits from the vine-like bramble, creating a sneaky tangling weed to stop people in their tracks.
Instead of several green leaves like the Lakelurker Grass, the Black Tangler completely leaves behind its ability to photosynthesize, turning pitch black to camouflage in the dark waters and subsisting entirely off of mana. Each Black Tangler root only has one long leaf, which is wider and thicker than its cousin, each side covered in tiny spikes like a burr that grab onto a person, allowing the weed to tangle them up even more. I only planted a few of them, so that they didn’t take over and outbreed the Lakelurker Grass, but I made sure that their single leaves were very long, winding through all of the water.
Now, for a more active threat. You know those tiny little crab things? Well now I have a massive version the size of a human torso, with a pale white, semi-transparent shell. I thickened the exoskeleton and gave them stronger book lungs, a hint of magic increasing the efficiency of their lungs and circulation to keep up with their size. They spend their time at the bottom of the now deeper pond, scavenging for algae and sucking the sap out of the lake weeds.
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Playing off of their instincts, I set up their nesting areas at the far end of the pond area, so the closer a swimming person is to the end of the puzzle area, the more territorial and aggressive the macro-aphid crabs become, though I made their ‘attacking’ claws more like clubs than anything, essentially bullying people back to the other side. Funnily enough, they kind of look like mirelurks now that they’ve been sized up.
Mentally taking a step back to look over it all, I have to say I like the look. A sparkling tower of water, the soothing sound of trickling water, reflecting waves of cool colors of light across the walls and ceiling. A test of wit and bravery, ‘walking’ on water over a miniature lake filled with lush green moss lily pads and lake weeds, little sparkling colored stones at the bottom of the black lake like a second sky, occasionally covered by dark lines or distorted behind glass-like creatures to hint at the danger behind the beautiful scenery. An Alien Pondscape.
Satisfied with my work and the aesthetic it gives off, I move on to the other half of my new workspace, the section where my core now resides. I hum and haw over what to do, eventually deciding to review the new animal genomes I now have available for inspiration, summing a few of each in order to give the base species a chance at making a niche for themselves. While I do so, I go ahead and make some little hidden burrows and tunnels in the terraced garden zone, leading past the Alien Pondscape and into the new zone.
The rat tail, obviously, gets me some rats, though these seem to grow larger naturally than the ones I’m used to, nearly the size of a medium sized dog. I make sure to summon an even mix of males and females, all different colors and patterns for some genetic variety. The necklace gets me a nice mix of creatures, mostly birds, but the amber is a surprising boon as well. I summon in what are, for all intents and purposes, is a regular raven, though their feathers have an odd magibiological structure that essentially makes them hard to focus on. It doesn’t work on me of course, since I can see everything inside of me, but it’s a really cool effect! If I’m looking at it right, normal eyes will just glide over them, reading as ‘normal not-threatening object’ when the mind is processing them. In the dark of the cavern, they’re essentially invisible.
The other bird is quite unique though, looking a bit like a woodpecker mixed with a sparrow, striking feather color contrasts making them stand out even in the gloom. From what I can tell, they tend towards bloodletting, landing on large animals and poking through their hide with their needle-like beak. They get away with it because their saliva is a numbing agent, along with an antiseptic and blood clotter, so once they’re done the animal is left none the wiser, and they’re insectivores too, so they probably deal with parasites as ‘payment’ to land on big animals. Big potential for a medical good for adventurers!
Probably the coolest animal I’d seen so far though, is what I can only describe as a weasel-bat wyvern creature. It’s got the long body of a weasel, with a poofy tail for balance, and six limbs which is freaking wild to see in person. Rather than having an upper torso protected by ribs and a lower torso with just organs, they have ribs more like a snake, but with two sets of legs at the ends and a pair of bat-like wings in the middle. Their heads are very much bat-like though, with big eyes and ears and a short snout, and their legs are longer than a weasels, made for climbing trees.
As for the amber, even though most of it is mineralized, the resin still has enough DNA for me to get a good copy of the tree that made it, along with some pollen from a flower that managed to get mixed in. Making some copied pseudo-dirt from the terraced garden zone, I summon up seeds for both of them and infuse them both with a good bit of mana. Fun fact, It’s less mana intensive to grow something from a seed, rather than summoning something full grown, less Aspected atoms that you need to summon yourself.
Sprouting from the dirt comes a small, stunted pine tree-esque plant, turned into a kind of shrub thanks to the ceiling being too low, the needles sprouting in aquamarine blue clusters all along the branches. The ancient flower almost looks like a sunflower, but the stem is only about a foot tall and much thicker, with the petals being a deep, burnt orange. The amber and the fact that I just Jurassic Park’ed some plants back into existence gives me a sudden bolt of inspiration for this room, and I get to work setting things up.
First, base stuff. I pretty much copy-paste the Terraced Garden zone’s schematics, recessing the floor of the new core room down a good 5 feet and filling it with a mix of larger stones, terrace soil, and groundwater. After that is the moss, ferns, and weeds, along with all of my mushrooms, pretty much everything ground-level. Next is the new variant of the ancient pine tree, which I gave some traits from both the ancient sunflower and the red bramble vine. It has a more winding trunk and branch growth pattern, almost like a full-sized bonsai tree mixed with a weeping willow.
I can only fit a half dozen of them inside, but they definitely give off an ancient forest feel, especially once I add the crimson leaf vine all along the walls to give the room a thick forest feel. The new trees have very thin, orange leaves, thin enough that light can shine through, along with little clusters of maroon flowers that hang from the drooping tips of the branches. I fill in the rest of the space with the normal brambles, along with a harder kind of table mushroom made to mix woody lignin into its structure, and a completely alien mushroom that is mostly spherical, a small enchanted piece of amber in the center of the sphere allowing yellow light to shine through.
At the very back of the room, I grow one last tree, forcing the trunk to split and wind around my Core before fusing back together above me, creating a protective wooden cage. If someone got this far, they’d have to cut through the bark and wood to get me out of the dungeon. As a final touch, I mix together my patterns for amber and white quartz, peppering it liberally into the ceiling and enchanting it all to light up, the light growing weaker or stronger in undulating waves. It creates a soft orange-gold light that mixes well with the light of the glow-shrooms, shadows and light shifting over the mini forest like it’s a cloudy day at sunset. Personally I think it contrasts well with the dark black, purple and blue of the Alien Pondscape, but that could just be personal bias.
Alright, the environment is set up, time for the animals! First off, I make two new species branching off of the Bloodpecker. One is more passive and smaller than the Bloodpecker, perching on the drooping tree branches with their tiny talons to sip up the nectar of the tree’s flowers. They’ve switched entirely to red plumage, camouflaging to look like the flowers they feed off of as protection. The other species I only make a few mating pairs of, so that they don’t devastate the rest of the population.
They are much bigger than the Bloodpecker, looking a bit like an Emu but with fully functioning wings. The needle-like beak of its cousin now has a blade-like edge on both sides, ending in a spaded tip. When hunting the rats that have already started to proliferate, they spear them on their beaks, then use the muscles in their jaw that are like the reverse of an alligator to slice their prey in two.
For the rats and ravens, I decide to specialize them in intelligence, considering their already smart bases. Now situated in the Terraced Gardens with the Fennice and their kids are a small colony of mice. Still larger than earth mice, I managed to boost their intelligence, to the point that I’m vaguely concerned they might be actually sapient. They’re certainly trying to make tools already, and they seem to be quite interested in the Fennice, which are about twice as big as them.
The new ravens stay in the ancient forest zone, the few that I made becoming somewhat of a gang. Visually they look almost identical to the regular ravens, except for being a bit larger with silver colored beaks (a personal distinction), but when they open their wings another little trick makes itself known. I’d been experimenting with the natural enchantment on their feathers, and ended up making something essentially the opposite, white feathers that glitter with iridescence and draw the eye. I liked the look but didn’t want to destroy their camouflage, so I put them as the feathers on the bottom side of their wings. They seem to like dancing to each other, and last I checked they were scouting out the whole dungeon, and developing what seems to be an actual language.
The weasel-bat thing (Which I have mentally titled Weaselern, as in weasel-wyvern), while doing reasonably well in the ancient forest, I felt could do better elsewhere with some evolution. I made a new species that, oddly enough, fit best in the Alien Pondscape. They got a bit larger, with a more otter-like look to them, slipping in and out of the water and using their wings for both flying and swimming, water sliding off of their fur thanks to a special oil. They like to harass the Mega Crabs, and I ended up making burrows in the walls that start underwater and lead up to little air pockets to nest in.
Back in the Terraced Gardens, things haven’t changed much, the main difference being that the Fennice family is all up and about, interacting with the super mice. There are 4 females and two males, with the males tails having wisps of Life and Water aspect in the fur. I’m assuming it’s some kind of way to ‘look’ more attractive to females, which implies that they can see mana. Definitely something to test later, but for now I’m quite happy with what I’ve accomplished. I’d say I’ve done a good job of setting up, and the whole making new forms of life thing!
...except I’m still just a straight line. Shit.