The zapper storm needed a bit of tweaking, I never expected it to be so strong. The way it had completely obliterated the tall grass below it even though the grass and dirt below it was soaking wet spoke volumes of its power. With a thought, I lowered the maximum amount of power each strike could have and re-ran it.

The power was significantly lesser this time but the amount of clouds gathered was too much, I tweaked it further to spawn in some normal thunder clouds too, and set a max limit on the amount of clouds that could exist at any given time.

Next, I wove another enchantment into the zapping clouds that allows them to spawn blades of blue electric grass that would race along the thunderbolt when it discharged. With that done, I tested it out a few more times, tweaking the power of the lightning strikes each time until it seemed reasonable to me.

With this weather phenomenon done, I linked it to the weather system and jumped to another thread. Okay, so I already have two unique weather phenomena. I wanted to go up to five but decided against doing so, three would be enough, and I had other things to do.

I had mobs to craft, events and items to make, enchantments to weave, and so much more. Who knew being a dungeon involved so much mental labor? The stories I remember reading made floor crafting look easy, that was such a lie.

What would my last one be, though? I wanted it to be a paragon when it came to uniqueness and power, it would also be extremely rare because of that. I also wanted it to be a trail of sorts, but that would come later once I made the loot system and the monster spawning system along with some others.

Eventually, I decided on a grass tornado made of magically sharp blades of grass, the tornado would have a chest inside that granted whoever made it to the eye a unique reward. But the rewarding part would come later after I set up the loot distribution system and some other stuff.

I quickly wove the idea and the relevant concepts into the weather system and it accepted it at the cost of a large amount of soul essence, with but a mere thought a tornado made of grass popped into existence.

It ripped up anything in its path, huge chunks of dirt and grass vanished into its growing form and within a few seconds, a part of the floor wall was sucked up too. I quickly shut it off and repaired the damaged areas.

Oh boy, that was maybe a bit too powerful. I wove a dynamic enchantment of durability and resistance into the entire floor. It would only activate when a weather event reached a certain point of power. I didn’t want my entire floor to be ripped apart because a weather phenomenon grew too powerful.

I then dove into the weather system and tweaked the maximum power of the grassado, as I now call it. With the new tweaks, the grassado could do some floor damage, like rip apart trees and medium patches of grass but it could never reach a level of power where it could affect the wall of my dungeon or cause too much damage.

With that done I could finally move on to deciding what kind of mob I wanted to spawn on this floor. I wanted all the mobs on this floor to be magical and grass-themed in some way, if not I would just go for nature-themed magic.

I also wanted to experiment with a magic system for mobs, I was tired of weaving enchantments into them manually, and I wanted to implement a system that would allow them to gain magic if the conditions were met and allow them to evolve along with their magic.

I wanted this system to extend and reach anything in my dungeon eventually, then it would be a proper magic system. I ran through a bunch of ideas, from runes to spells but eventually settled on ambient magic and cores.

The idea was to set up a system that would take soul essence from my liquid soul essence pool and turn it into its gaseous form before dispersing it into the air, the dispersed soul essence would slowly fill the floor and slowly elevate anything it touched to a higher state.

That higher state would be better than its mundane counterpart in every way, as all its flaws would be magicked away slowly as it absorbed more ambient magic, eventually taking in enough to form a core. Once a core was formed it would reach out to the pool of souls within me and pluck one out.

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The core formed would be elemental, what element it was depended solely on what type of ambient soul essence absorbed. I still didn’t know how souls became elemental, hopefully, I'll figure that out when I got the chance to study the elemental soul in my possession.

I spawned four solid blocks of gold, steel, iron, and blue diamond and had them float in the air. To start my magic system, I would need something to distribute the ambient magic, I could’ve used a simple enchantment, but I wanted the source of magic to be a physical component, it would be a valuable resource and I planned to form an event around them later.

The material had to be extremely conductive and would allow pure soul essence to pass through with zero to negligible loss. I began by running a small amount of soul essence through the block of gold.

BANG!

The block violently exploded in a shower of molten gold. Bummer, next! The same thing happened with steel and iron, only lasting a few seconds more than gold. I honestly had no hopes left when I ran some soul essence through the blue diamond, I was very surprised when it simply passed through and appeared on the other side.

Yes! Now onto phase two!

I formed it into a box with a square opening on the top, wove the strongest durability enchantment I could into it, and watched in mild surprise as it shifted from its blue color to a jet-black color. I copied the pattern to see what was up and got a new diamond pattern called black diamond.

The material was durable beyond belief and was extremely conducive to all types of energy.

Sweet! This was just what I wanted, I would use this as the base of all my magical systems, as well as monsters. Next, I wove a color-changing enchantment into it and set it to red before passing a bit of soul essence through it and watched as it came out on the other side, changing from transparent to dark red.

I then wove a complex enchantment that would basically allow the magic dispenser to stay connected to all magic that came through it directly from me. I didn’t want to manually clean up all the dispersed soul essence every time I rolled out an update.

I then spawned a bunch of these and distributed them all over the floor, I then linked everything up and wove another enchantment into it that passively pulled soul essence from my pool. I dialed the enchantment up and watched as the entire floor fill up with red ethereal mist.

The mist didn’t block my vision as I expected it to, I could still see just fine if I wanted to, which was nice. It just floated there though, aimlessly drifting, some even returned to me through the walls and dirt of this floor. First problem found! I quickly wove an enchantment into the magic dispensers that would replicate any changes I made to them if I willed it to be so, and then I wove another enchantment into one that removed the ambient soul essence’s ability to drift back to me.

Something inside of me felt giddy at just being able to do that, this was real magic! I loved every moment of it, I didn’t know who I was before being reborn, but I felt like this was my calling, what I’ve always wanted to do.

I watched the ambient soul essence drift around for another hour, stretching my senses to see if any more problems would crop up, none did. When I saw that it was okay, I moved on to phase two and wove an enchantment into the magic dispenser that would change the color of the soul essence depending on where it was.

The mist shifted instantly as the enchantment settled in, the section drifting near the grass became a rich green, the section in the air became a clear white, and the cloud passing through the air became an earthly brown. A small section of it turned crystal blue as it drifted around the water tree, hints of brown and vibrant green appeared around it too.

Experimentally, I spawned a rat and watched as the ambient soul essence around it became a bright white color. The unattributed soul essence rushed into the rat, and I watched as it twitched and came alive as a nascent soul formed within it.

Interesting! This made things a lot easier, I could already see massive farms filled with soulless creatures and ambient soul essence constantly forming souls. That would be for later though, now that I knew soul essence worked like this moved to the next phase of my magic system plan: elements!

With a thought, I wove in an enchantment that would make the colored soul essence gather and sink into things that matched its color and had the same concept as the color it was made of. For it to recognize what concept matched its color I had to input all the related concepts myself but that was a small issue, next I wove in an enchantment that would dictate the speed of absorption based on the material’s conductivity.

As soon as the enchantments settled in the attributed soul essence began to shift across the floor, and grass-attributed soul essence clung to blades of grass and sank into them, the same went for wood, water, and earth.

New ambient soul essence constantly filled the floor as this happened and this repeated itself until everything was stuffed full of their respective soul essence. I kept an eye on the rat as this happened and its soul had tripled in size, blooming to the size of a human.

Its eyes glinted with human-like intellect, and it was rapidly learning how to use the unattributed soul essence that filled its soul. Other types of soul essence constantly tried to infect its soul, but it batted them away each time, only taking in unattributed soul essence.

Ah, this was a problem. The enchantment array didn’t see unattributed soul essence as an element so other elements were constantly trying to get in, even though the soul already had a type of soul essence in it.

A quick update to the element enchantment later and the issue was fixed, the rat looked confused when the barrage of elemental soul essence stopped but then sent a silent thank you through our connection.

You are welcome, little one.

“!!!”

Ha, I like him already. I might turn him into a boss. Yes, I will do just that, I was no longer going to despawn him. Not now though, I had a magic system to make, it was time to move to the next phase of my grand plan: Elevation!

Now that I had magic that would cling to anything relayed to its concept, I wanted the magic to improve whatever took it in, bringing it closer and closer to the concept the energy embodied. I planned on separating this improvement into stages, like cultivation novels.

I didn’t know how many stages I would have yet, but I knew it would be a lot, I might even make a stage where an ordinary mob could improve to the level of a floor boss and fight it for its spot.

Hehehe! This was all so interesting!