I ordered one of my surveillance bats to go outside and retrieve something for me. After a couple of hours, when the sun was just starting to rise, it had returned. It staggered as it entered the desolate fortress. Finally, I've been waiting on him for a while. The bat carried a handful of seeds of the same kind.

Perhaps I should've specified that I wanted a bunch of different kinds. Oh well, I might as well use these. Carrying a bunch of topsoil from the dense forests into the second floor, I begin to tinker with the seeds. I first try to imbue it with mana and put it in the soil. After giving it some water, I began to augment it. The seed grew into a sprout and then grew, even more, to become a small sapling before stopping. The mana it took to grow that wasn't as much as expected. Though the sapling was imbued with mana, it did not possess a mana core. It, however, still held mana within its trunk and throughout its branches. Perhaps plants have a different way to store and hold mana in comparison to animals.

Pondering on the matter for a minute, I begin to set the sapling on fire; mundane fire, not of magical origin, still burned as hot. The inferno scorched the bark of the young sapling, and the mana within it seemed to grow dull and started to falter. After this, I began to imbue the sapling with life mana, yet after an hour, the fire still burned faster than the sapling could grow, causing the young plant to die, leaving only an ashen husk. Life mana doesn't seem to bode well against fire of any kind. Maybe the best course of action would be to fight fire with fire? So I grew another sapling and ignited it once more, and imbued it with fire mana; however, it only seemed to hasten the speed of the ravenous fire, turning it into an ashen husk only a minute later.

This matter requires a bit more work. Since life mana did seem to be effective in staving off the fire by regenerating faster than the fire could burn but the fire only grew larger and larger to the point in which the regeneration could not save it any longer. Maybe durability is the problem; the plant could regenerate just as fast as the fire could burn, but the damage would increase exponentially over time due to small cracks and fissures forming. Maybe I could use two mana sources here both life and earth? So I began to imbue the seed and started to grow it into a sapling; once more, I set it ablaze and imbued it. This time, the sapling was holding its ground, not letting the ravenous inferno consume it. After a day or so, the sapling seemed to reach an equilibrium with the fire. Finally, that took far longer than initially expected. I begin to place the sapling in the brazier and let it grow, reaching the size of an old apple tree.

After making it reach its maximum size, it began to produce a crimson-red fruit? Perhaps the seeds collected were from a fruit tree of some kind. It looked like an apple mixed with a lemon. Watching the fruit grow to its maximum size, I plucked one from the tree to dissect it. It seemed like citrus, though I'm not a hundred percent sure. I let a mundane bat eat it. It shook and started panting; its face had a red tinge, and it opened its mouth and started flying frantically around the cave. Is it spicy? Well, maybe the fruit would work as the reward for this floor; after all, spice is quite a desirable luxury maybe it has a use in the culinary arts.

After the rewards, the mechanics, and the style of the floor had been laid out, I began to add the finishing touches. I scattered primitive flint tools across the caves, and I decorated the cave walls throughout the entire cave system with paintings depicting humans running out of the cave and dying en masse to blazing infernos and suffocating clouds of ash and smoke. This should give any delver here a chance to realize what the true threat of this floor is. I add smaller, more discreet enchantments to the pitfalls, allowing them to fix themselves after being broken, and added additional traps lining the cave ceiling that would cave in if a delver wasn't safe enough. After tinkering with the cave system a bit more, I think I can truly say the second floor has been completed.

That took a while, though I must say I'm proud of my work. The cave system would be a slog to traverse through. The traps and crevices would slow most groups down, and the time limit would serve to make the delvers reckless as they hurry to get to the fire before they suffocate, activating the myriad of traps prepared for them. Admiring my work for some time, I had realized the surveillance bats seemed to have reached a stable population of around thirty. I sent nine bats away to see what lay beyond my small highland territory. Sent north three bats would have to brave an unassailable mountain range. Even I knew nothing of what lay on the other side of it. To the east, west, and south, the lands were more idyllic; however, I'm not sure what lay there either, which is why I am sending them in the first place. They should be able to come back in ten days or so if they are fortunate enough to survive.