I begin to excavate a large dome-like structure beneath the second floor. This will be my most ambitious floor yet. I plan to make a Sumerian ziggurat, keeping in line with the historical themes I've set out. The Sumerians were the first proper civilization on earth, creating great monuments, inventing the first form of writing, and revolutionizing agriculture.

I can only wonder if a similar civilization had sprung across this world's history. This floor will be the largest yet, spanning a kilometer in radius. The sheer amount of stone needed to be removed was enormous; I had to compress it into immensely dense stone bricks to make sure I could store all the materials collected for later use. The goal would be a herculean task to complete, though very much possible. I had to reinforce the cave walls to make sure it did not collapse in on itself.

After weeks of pure excavation, I had completed the empty canvas on which I will paint the floor's mechanisms and defences upon. I look towards the ceiling of the room and start working on the most complex and Intricate enchantment I have ever made. Carving hexagonal imprints upon the cave ceiling, I began gathering all the copper I had excavated from all the other floors and began to melt it, pouring it into the hexagonal indents on the ceiling.

After the metal had solidified, I imbued the copper with pure darkness mana, and the tenebrous element started to engulf the copper with haste, rendering it nearly pitch black. I enchanted it with the intent to black out the entire ceiling. After days of tinkering with the enchantment, I had completed it. An artificial sky though it possessed no stars or moon to illuminate the floor. This was truly an engineering or should I say an artifice-ing marvel.

Although the effect is quite good, the mana needed to even activate it for longer than a week would take a large quantity of my mana reserves, so I decided to implement a system within my dungeon causing all enchantments to remain inert unless an intruder was detected on the floor. That would save a lot of my mana in the future. Now that the pure black night sky is finished, I should start construction on the ziggurat, but I must first build up its surroundings.

Gathering rich soil from the surface, I began to lay it out across the entirety of the floor, making sure to add loose rocks and stones on the bottom of the floor to act as both the bedrock of the floor and its groundwater source. Ordering the bats to retrieve more seeds and the like for me. I begin to sculpt the floor, making most of it lay flat with a few hills and dips in elevation here and there. In the very furthest part of the dome in relation to the entrance, I began to sculpt an elevated plane acting as the plateau on which the ziggurat will rest upon.

Finishing the landscaping on the floor, I began to collect the seeds the bats had retrieved. Among them were seeds of reeds from a riverbed, pinecones from the dense forests of the Highlands, some palm trees, some shrubbery, some grasses, and grape-like seeds that came from vines that stretched into the rocky cliff faces of the jagged mountains. Now I need a suitable climate. The Sumerians were people who relied on two great rivers to keep their civilization afloat in the vast and arid deserts of the Near East.

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However, it would make more sense for defense to make this floor a dense and humid jungle, as the floor wasn't large enough to contain a desert vast enough to keep intruders at bay. To create a jungle, I needed a suitable climate. So behind the veil of night, I created an enchantment that would span the entire sky, collect precipitation from the air, and would in twelve hour intervals pour down torrential rain. And to the four cardinal directions of the floor, I created an air-mana based enchantment that would blow gusts of violent wind in different directions at different times of day.

After days of fiddling with the specificities of the enchantments, I had completed them both. The rain and winds would serve as vectors of disease and hypothermia; it would also muddle the sounds of any predators lurking behind the foliage. With the climate and landscape completed, I began work on the flora. The highland forests were temperate, so any plant from there wouldn't be adapted to the humidity of this floor, so I would have to change that. I gathered the palm tree seeds that would be best suited to the climate and enhanced them, making its wood more flexible so it would not break under the stresses of the wind.

I increased the size of its leaves, making it more tear-resistant. I then enhanced it with water mana, making it more resistant to water damage to its roots and more absorbent. I then enhanced the grass and shrubbery with the same water mana. After finishing up the flora and scattering it across the floor, I began to work on the fauna. Gathering a variety of bugs from the outside, I scattered them across the jungle. Cockroaches, beetles, ants, etc. crawl in this new cold and humid environment.

Insects are hardy creatures; they can probably survive this change in environment and even thrive considering the abundance of water, foliage, and resources. But one of the myriad insects I change. The mighty mosquito; the most deadly animal on the planet, or at least on my planet. These little pests will serve as a swarm-type monster for this floor. I begin to change their appearance, making them resemble scarabs. I alter their instincts to make them swarm together instead of being spread apart. Among the ravenous swarm of mosquitoes, I selected 12 that were the healthiest and strongest among their kind and imbued them with light and life mana.

These two elements seem very compatible with each other, similar to the life and earth combination. These radiant scarabs were the only source of light in the dark, tenebrous confines of the floor. Their light will serve to attract prey insect and human alike. They too will direct the swarm and give it purpose, and for that, I made them considerably larger to house their more sophisticated minds. These 'scarab flies' will reside near and around stagnant pools of water I've laid across the floor, both as their breeding grounds and the places where they will become filthy and vile, so when they may strike an unwary intruder, only a couple bites would be enough to make the intruder stricken with disease.

As for the other monsters, I decided to capture a pair of lizards from the outside. These were different from the blind lizards that resided within the caves; they were smaller and weaker, probably due to predation. I enlarge these lizards to twice the size of a Komodo dragon and imbue them with water mana; I toughen their scales to protect them from mosquito bites; and give them a wicked sense of smell so they could track their prey from anywhere within the floor. I make them solitary creatures, letting them discuss where they would like to reside, and by discuss, I mean fight these disputes, which would allow them to learn how to fight and weed out the weaker ones from their population. With most of the floor done, I began construction on the ziggurat.