The Ratmousestalker pattern was far from being complete though. I had lots of other things to add, some minor and large. I wanted them to breed a lot, their lifespans should be significant too. Reproduction was easy, lifespan was a bit trickier, and I didn’t know how to do it quite yet, so I was forced to delay the modification.

After thinking for a bit, I decided it was time I worked on my second floor. I neglected it for far too long. I was happy to see that the ecosystem had stabilized, and everyone was living in harmony, even though said harmony came from constant war.

No side was winning though, so it was okay. The number of deaths were within acceptable numbers too, the amount of soul essence I was getting from this floor because of this was significant.

Still, the floor was lacking, it had no boss creature. I wanted to fix that now, but I was hesitant. Should I elevate a mob of this floor to boss level and call it a day or design something unique? In the end I went with making a unique mob.

I shifted my attention down to my experimental room and spawned in a fully grown ember tree and had it float in the air.

Hmmm.

How did I want to do this? Could I even do this? It was my first time making a boss from such unconventional materials, but I got to work.

I first shaped it into a roughly humanoid shape then made it pearly white and enhanced the redness of its leaves and removed any excess branches. After that I reshaped it a little more and defined its features while making it a bit more aesthetically pleasing and scary.

After I was done it had shrunk down quite a bit and was around five meters tall instead of its original fifteen. I did this to balance things out and even the playing field a little bit, I had plenty of soul essence, but human souls gave me something my monsters couldn't. The last few ones had transformed my soul essence completely.

I wanted to find out what that was, and I also wanted more simply because they gave massive amounts of the stuff. I didn’t want to be a place of death alone though, I wanted to be something more in addition to that.

Anyway! Back to Boss designing.

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I split the middle of his trunk and widened it a little bit, then I wove in some enchantments that would make the surrounding wood soft and fleshy but also extremely durable and shock absorbent.

Then I spawned in a normal rat eye and enlarged it until it was appropriate, I then changed its color to yellow with little bits of white and made it vertically slit then slotted it in.

Oh boy! Here comes the hard part. I then wove in an enchantment into the wood surrounding the eye that made it fuse with it and become one with it slightly. The eye that was sitting in the ember tree's trunk loosely instantly shifted as the wood around it tightened and dug into it slightly.

When I saw that it wasn’t about to explode under pressure I sighed in relief mentally.

I wanted this eye to act as a weapon as well as a weak point for this boss, it would be closed during its first phase. The split it was in would be very hard to break when it was, when it was open though it would be a different story.

The eye itself would house a lot of modifications and enhancements. That would be very complicated though, so I moved on to the other modifications I wanted to make.

I gave it a light enchantment, a movement one along with a durability one too. Just general boss upgrades, next, I moved on to the more interesting ones. I quickly made the texture of its bark slightly stringy instead of smooth and uniform. Then, I wove in an enchantment that would passively shift its skin to be denser at areas where a lot of damage was being dealt.

I also gave it a passive ability that would drain soul essence from the ground in order to heal some parts of it, this was a weak but useful ability. It couldn’t regenerate lost limbs or anything, but it would make a difference.

The ability would be active as long as its root-like feet were connected to the ground, and it didn’t move.

With that done it was time to give it a few active abilities! I wove in an enchantment that would allow it to temporarily shape soul essence into five blades of wood that would circle around it. It could shoot them at whoever it likes but doing that would cost a lot of essence.

After thinking for a bit, I locked the ability behind an enchantment that would only allow it to form one until its second phase was unlocked. That was a bit too op, after that little nerf, I gave it the ability to form a shield out of wood that would last for a while depending on how much force it absorbed.

Shortly after, I gave it an ability that would allow it to freely manipulate its body to form wooden spikes and whips out of its own mass.

With that done I smoothed out the relevant enchantments within it and checked each thread for bugs or errors and placed in a few connect runes for good measure.

Next, I began working on the enchantment that would take it from stage one to stage two. In stage two it would be high damage but very low defense, as it would be its last stand. The eye would make roots spring up from the ground and entangle whoever was nearby.

I even went back and designed a stage two animation and death animation for it and the loot that will spawn after its death.

With that done I tweaked the overall loot enchantment some more and lowered the overall power of ranked mobs, hopefully the tweak was alright and anyone who is copper or lower ranked should be able to take down one.

I also removed the gold pouch from the loot table and instead placed a single golden coin.

With that done I gathered my soul essence and gave a name to my new boss.

‘From this day on you shall be known as Eve, guardian of the crimson forest.’

Golden light bloomed.