Examining the bats, I experiment with their minds. I peer into their lives and their memories and become disoriented. Their memories were strange, alien. Some memories were hazy as though perturbed by an unknowable fog, and some were clear as water, yet that does not mean it was a pleasant experience. The mind was a complex thing. I think the memories obtained by performing a lobotomy were imprecise at best, though I'm fairly sure it's only a matter of time before I crack the puzzle and uncover its secrets.

Though I must say these bats have horrible vision, I suppose sight won't be very helpful in the pitch-black darkness of a cave system. Their long-term memory is surprisingly good, though it does make sense as they would need to navigate the vast cave networks and return to their swarm if they were to survive. Strength in numbers, it appears.

After I stop tinkering with bat brains, I attempt to augment the giant bat, yet it appears I cannot do so? I imbue one of the other bats with regular mana, and they develop a core. I can augment the mundane bats just fine, yet not ones that have developed a core naturally? Perhaps for me to augment a creature, I must be the one to imbue the core. So that it will possess my mana and my mana alone?

Though I don't intend to use the tamed giant bat quite yet. I'll probably order it to return to the cave with a couple of his former cavemates so that they may procreate. It can act as a mini-boss for any intruder wandering through the cave system. After taking the giant bat to its home cave, I took a breeding pair of bats and imbued them with dark mana, and increased the size of their brains. I expand their wingspans and hooks just a bit and start to improve their vision. Unlike the lizards, these eyes still seem to work, although quite badly. If I were to guess, it seems like, given another couple thousand years, they would've ditched their sense of sight completely.

Thankfully, with eyes that work, I can 'fix' them. To act as my eyes and ears, I give these bats an extremely good sense of vision. Yet it seems they have a form of inherent red-green color blindness, which is not ideal, but it looks like I can't fix it. They already possess an innately good sense of hearing and echolocation. So after a few tweaks, my surveillance bats are complete; these will serve as my eyes and ears. Their darkness mana, if used correctly, and I've altered their instincts to make them do so, will cover them in a shroud of darkness, making them practically undetectable to the naked eye.

I plan to release these into the wild and have them return here for me to examine their memories and ascertain my spot on the world stage. While I wait for my surveillance bats to procreate, I begin work on the second floor. Since it's only the second, I plan for it to be a bit more minimalistic in scope. I've decided the theme will be 'mesolithic' basically meaning middle stone age. It'd be easier to do historical themes for my floors since that was what I studied for. Maybe I'll decide to theme my floors around historical time periods. But that's a thought I'll complete later. I should create a layout for the second floor.

First, I plan to make another cave under the fortress, so I begin excavating around fifty meters below the fortress so as not to damage its foundations. The entrance will be an artificial cylindrical tunnel with fragile stone indents to act as a ladder. With the entrance complete, I dug a vast network of thin, winding caves. Though after a while I notice I've found some metals and clay. A light blue rock, which I believe to be oxidized copper; some small patches of iron ore; some quartz; and a weird bronze-colored metal I've never seen before. Well, it could be that it's simply a mundane metal, which I simply don't know of. I'm not a geologist, after all, and it took me a while to ascertain what the other metals were.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

I tried to imbue the metal with mana; its temperature rose, emitting a crimson-red mana. I kept imbuing it until it started to melt the rock beneath it, and then I stopped. This metal seems to possess similar qualities to the gem that rested on the fallen king's staff, although proportionally weaker. This new red mana felt passionate and powerful, yet it also felt uncontrollable and unpredictable. I'll call it fire mana, for lack of a better term. This mana feels far more volatile than the others I have come across. Though I should get back to work. After storing the metals within an enclosed space, I began to excavate the cave some more. I added stalactites and stalagmites across the cave walls as I went, making sure to add a pattern into each one for extra authenticity. I added pitfalls made of thin and brittle stone; these pitfalls would have stalagmites underneath them to skewer any unfortunate soul not careful enough. making sure to make the cave as natural as possible by adding cracks and crevices in the walls. After a couple miles of twists and turns, I began constructing the final room, it was a wide and tall cave around 10 meters in radius and 10 meters in height.

In the center, I added a stone brazier carved and chipped away by its previous owners. I made sure to add little details of past residence, like artificial chips in the wall and cave paintings made of red clay. I made sure to splatter a cave painting on every wall of the room. On the entrance, It depicted lighting striking a small sapling, igniting it, and from it, a forest fire burned. When it reaches halfway across the room, it depicts a group of humans learning to use fire from the scorched forests to cook their game and to warm themselves. However, nearing the end of the room, the fire was depicted engulfing a huge group of people, massacring them. At the end, it was depicted as an object of worship and reverence by the survivors. That took a while, but it still looks quite crude well at least that was the intention. We can't have cavemen drawing the Mona Lisa.

Overall, I think this room is good. Now this floor won't be containing any monsters. It will only have one mechanic. An insidious one. When any Delvers enter this floor, I will set a ravenous fire in the final room if the Delvers are too slow all the oxygen in the cave system will be burned or the smoke from within will suffocate them. This will also make it harder for any large groups of people to enter my dungeon. At least that was the idea, but it'll probably take a bit of fiddling to get the time right. This cave is around 10 miles in pure length, but considering the cracks and crevices the person would have to maneuver through, it would probably take a bit longer to walk the distance. So if the average walking speed of a person is around 3 mph, and if you disregard the obstacles... That would be 10/3, which is 3.33... So it takes around three hours to walk by foot, so ideally I would set the time for the oxygen to burn to be half of that, so around an hour and a half at most. But I have to create the fire enchantment on the brazier first.

I turn my gaze over to the stone brazier and start to think. I gather the bronze-like metal, which I'll just refer to as flarium for simplicity's sake. I coat the bottom of the brazier in flarium and start to work on an experimental enchantment. In the entrance to the second floor, I begin to imbue iron ore, which I've flattened out at the bottom of the entrance, with life mana. I intend for it to detect any life mana that is near it and release a very specific pattern of mana emissions. After testing the enchantment, it seemed to work fine. So here was the tricky part I needed another enchantment to detect the specific mana emissions and then activate. So by imbuing the flarium with fire mana, I intend for it to heat up until it reaches a blistering heat. Oh, wait, I forgot I needed a fuel source. Fire can't exist without fuel. Any mundane wood would work, but I'd have to replace it quite frequently, and I'd prefer my floors to be self-sustaining. Considering the sheer size of the envisioned fire I need something that can replenish itself faster than the fire can burn. I think I have an idea.