It had taken hours, probably a couple days, of seeping air into my room and making , now dubbed, oxygen farms but I had finally done it. My experimental room was a somewhat leaky, atmosphere filled and livable space. Air whistled in from the pinhole vents that lead off deeper into the stone, dozens of glowmoss nodes filled the room with breathable air and I couldn't be happier to have solved such a simple problem. A part of my mind was telling me to expand the pinholes, making room for slimes and effectively making new tube farms, but I knew the merit behind having redundant systems. If I ever had another breach I'd have at least one spot to come back and start again from, though I already had plans to expand this and make many more oxygen farms.

For now I had a simple enough problem, one I had figured out I had a solution for. I could collect gasses into my inventory system, overcoming my inability to make an over pressurized system, simply taking in some air and letting my farms naturally fill the experimental chamber over time. The only problem was the painfully slow process that entailed. MY experimental room was certainly a good spot to start, every spare inch coated in some form of moss or vine, but it simply wasn’t enough. I needed to grow this and get back to expanding my dungeon. It wasn’t an idle thought of ‘grow deeper and get more power’, I was thinking I might get access to sentient or semi sentient forces at some point, allowing me a shortcut instead of waiting for someone to chance upon me in some few millennia.

So, I started as I had so many days ago, by spawning in a slime. I was lucky, having the sense to put my second slime spawner in my experimental room, more laziness than sense actually. Whatever the reason i didn’t have to risk wasting biomatter by trying to spawn one in vacuum and trying to juggle it into my inventory and spawn it in the room For now i simply spawned it and gave the guy orders to harvest biomatter at half speed, being more concerned about making oxygen than trying to get my creatures back up in number. For the second part of my plan i moved back out into the cavern and started planting my new oxygen farms like seeds, digging tubes into the walls, a bit smaller than a cubed foot but, by extending the tube and adding separating walls to the oxygen farm i could set up multiple farms in sequence, hopefully letting them feed each other with oxygen one at a time. That might also not be how things work but it worked with my experimental room and I was throwing this together on short notice. I’d just have to remember to change things out if I figured out a better setup in the future.

The trick, I found, to setting them up successfully, was giving them a primer shot of air , letting the farm bloom and hold out long enough for the moss to grow and fill the area before the vacuum killed it. So that’s how things went, making one farm after another, practically honeycombing the walls of the cavern with my farms. It was the work of days, my humble experimental room not preparing me for the sheer volume the cavern, and other floors, would require. However, after a hundred farms, each holding ten oxygen chambers, I was beginning to wonder just how I wasn't getting to a point of saturation, why my chamber was still a stubborn vacuum instead of a flush ecosystem. I finally settled on what might be the problem, not discounting the sheer size of my dungeon.

My door was whistling, and that wasn’t a euphemism for something. While I couldn't hear it i could ‘feel’ air escaping past my fingers into the void of space, my attempts at stopping it simply not working as I had hoped. However, I knew my idea for a cork gasket worked, at least on a small scale. I hauled my door open, glad to find the metal hadn’t cold welded itself, and applied the cork gasket to the ridge on the doorway. I made it thin, and then in layers, wanting to preserve what biomatter i had left, my one slime only producing slowly. Finally I had something I hoped would work, pulling the door shut against the seal and waiting.

It took time for air pressure to begin building again, even with all of my farms, but it was building, and I was finding my seal wasn’t as air tight as I had hoped, but I could think of one solution at least. I heaved myself against the big door, applying what pressure I could, hoping I would gain enough air pressure eventually to allow the door to self seal, crushing the cork and proofing itself against the vacuum. I was lucky, lucky or I knew just enough to make things work right. The air flow seemed to slow in the areas I could reach and feel and I hoped that would mean I was building actual pressure. Still though, I started to apply my nodes wherever I could see an open space, determined to do more than hold the door while my plants worked passively.

Even as I held the door shut I was making a plan to improve it, making a pseudo airlock with this door opening like a normal one and a second door acting like a trap door, letting its own weight work to seal the air in. So, I passed the time by admonishing myself and swearing I'd take my time in the future, no matter my mood or emotional state. Time that turned out to be well spent, the whistling noise was growing louder and louder as the air pressure in my dungeon was growing stronger. I finally let off the door slowly, carefully listening for any further leaking caused by my lack of pressure, happy to find that the leaks didn’t intensify. It was loud and it leaked more than a Harley but it seemed good enough for government work, which was sadly good enough for me.

I moved quickly, going back down to the cavern and starting back up on my honeycomb of farms, suffering through the tedium just to ensure I wouldn't start at square one again. And so I continued this way, decorating the cavern with the hanging crone vine and excessive moss, taking time to add patches of copper in as I got a new idea for a seal. While my idea for cork was obviously a good one, considering the vague livability of my dungeon, I remembered other forms of gaskets from home, one involving copper and, usually rubber, a soft inner gasket core. The copper would form against the metal encasing it, I think, and the inner gasket should add some expansive pressure which might better mold the copper to the surface it’s supposed to be mated against. While it sounded good in theory I'd have to test it later when I got more room to play. However I was faced with a critical need for more biomatter, all resources really, and I'd need to start up my farms sooner rather than later.

Despite not wanting to give up on my normal floors just yet, I returned to my experimental room and started to expand it, slotting in more oxygen farms but leaving them open to allow a slime through. And, instead of my previous design, I simply put nodes down on the roof of the tube and accepted that this method would be less efficient in the long run. The design this time was more akin to an old school radiator, long tubes going out for sixty meters before curving tightly back and returning to the entry point, the wall. On further inspection i decided to make the roof of the tubes into a ‘V’ shape that would keep some of the moss away from the slimes, allowing for a somewhat faster regrow period, the idea being the ‘V’ would stay full of moss and expand quicker than starting from just the node’s center point.

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The experiment room quickly expanded, going from a single floor some twenty meters long and wide, to three floors twenty meters wide and nearly a hundred long. The tubes, simple in design, were set in like a honeycomb, a staggered placement allowing for the 26 cm tall holes to be stacked ten high, having expanded the ceiling some to better accommodate the new bio farms. The work had been a bit strange, with no slimes to do the work I had to glide through the stone while I dug it out by hand. While not unpleasant it was just another reminder that I wasn't human anymore. Another mark for my inhumanity was the sheer number of farms I'd created. While my first farm had been a work of boredom and attempting to alleviate it and provide a bonus in the meantime, this was the work of a man with a mission. Three thousand eight hundred and forty tubes per side, and I counted the outward and inward sections as two different tubes. And that was per wall, meaning on three floors I had twenty three thousand and forty tubes, approximately. I had only done the math out of sheer curiosity, and even then it was a rough estimate based on the size of the tubes and the length and height of the wall. I hadn’t even properly seeded them all, each only getting three nodes, one at the entrance and exit and one in the middle.

It would take more than a little time for the farms to be fully operational, hopefully my little v shape idea would work, but I had been collecting enough material to start summoning more slimes. I had to go and look at an etching I had made on my wall detailing a slimes farming speed and efficiency, Which showed I should have a slime per hundred and twenty tubes, assuming max efficiency and growth rate, which my new farms were nowhere near yet. However it was a good starting point. For now I just moved back to the section of floor i’d done my math on, dividing twenty three thousand by a hundred and twenty. I’d need a hundred and ninety two slimes for my farm, approximately. I think it was an exact number but i say approximately anyways because it shouldn’t take me minutes to do simple division and i couldn’t be sure I'd done any of my math right. Why was a fantasy setting so enamored with math, why wasn’t I slinging fireballs and bedding kobolds instead of playing with mathematical moss in space. Setting my lamentations aside, I got back to work, counting myself lucky that I'd only made the walls ten high and could count along the floor to mark sections off that would be under the control of each slime.

It had already been the work of days but I was beginning to appreciate my experience as a truck driver, long hours of boredom usually followed by sleep before doing it again the day after. The only annoying thing was the lack of any noise, save for the slimes sliding their way across the stone floor to their assigned point, which was no substitute for Jerry Reed. I was beginning to hope i’d get a slime mutation that would include some form of musical inclination. Though i wasn’t entirely correct about a lack of noise, my door was whistling louder and louder every day and it was a point of pride that i had managed to keep out producing the waste air, however i didn’t want to wait for my cheap gasket to fail completely and start dumping air like a spiked ball. So I often made trips up to the door and fed it a sacrifice of biomatter around the edges, letting the material be pulled in and slowly torn up by the eroding force of wind. I was beginning to wonder just how much air it would take to give the moon an atmosphere, but I was bad enough at math when counting with my fingers, I couldn't even begin to guess at the volume needed for terraforming.

So I set out to start up hopper production as well, the farms providing me with a somewhat stunted income but enough to spring for three hoppers and a slime, setting them loose on the ore spikes, which had tripled in size since the last time I'd measured them. Now standing at a proud five and a half meters. I was beginning to wonder if I'd have to stretch my control and make them stop at some point, but I was pretty sure they had slowed down a good deal so they might have a natural inclination towards size anyways. So, I set about my normal routine, spawning slimes and occasionally hoppers, increasing my farming potential and packing the door to keep my air in. It had finally reached a level of normalcy, my metal production finally getting to a point I could happily start making my second door.

I started off cautiously, adjusting my first floor to give me room to work things out, making the entry room deeper and filling in the second room, choosing to dig under it and making that room into the airlock. Then, in the third room, I started by making a small circular door. While the huge vault door seemed the best idea in the beginning, I hardly needed the entrance to be that size. A well made door should be able to take the weight just as well, and might leak a whole hell of a lot less. So I built a more modest frame, though I was more than generous with my metal application, coating the entire second and third room with a centimeter of general mineral. Tests I had done while waiting for slime and node spawns showed that I was right in my assumption that the general mineral was very much like aluminum. It was light weight and very malleable. So, I did the smart thing this time and began to level what I had made, bringing out my meter stick and using some vine and a stone.

It wasn’t the easiest way to level things, more for use in leveling walls, but the old school plumb bob did its job, letting me get a rough level on the surface of the frame and, more importantly, the portion the hatch would be resting on. The hatch was another matter. I did my best to make a portion of the floor level and smooth before making the hatch on it, a good five inches of general mineral, then I used the floor to sand down the hatch. Employing the teachings of Mr.Miyagi, I rotated the hatch in circles, clockwise for ten then counter for ten, until I had an almost polished surface on it, bringing it over and setting it in place. For my finishing touches I took the fitted hatch out and carefully put a groove in both the hatch and the frame, measuring it out so they would overlap eachother. This is where I made my new and experimental gasket. Getting my copper to come out in a tube was already hard but making it curve was testing my patience. Making me focus and restart after kinking things more than once. Eventually i had made the tube long enough to encircle the whole notch i’d carved. Now forcing my biomatter cork material into it was a new level of pain, instantly blowing it out and forcing me to start from scratch. It took five tries before i got it right and layed it into the groove, mating the two ends together with solid copper, unsure how to keep the tube going and fill it while it was closed.

Now came the time for the test, lowering the door down I added four notches to it, building up latches across from them that would allow me to clamp down the hatch and crush the seal into place. Which proved to not work as I was reminded the dungeon couldn’t be sealed off. With that in mind I substituted a simple latch with a boulder, letting its weight crush the seal, oddly enough not triggering the alert even though I was sure it achieved much the same.

Now came the final test, stepping out into the first room. I sat there and waited patiently, watching my moss die off as the sound started to lessen more and more, until i was eventually sitting in silence, not even coming back into the airlock provided any sound, the room was air tight and i could finally sit back and relax after battling for what felt like days. Simply sitting down felt like bliss.