The scorch hound yelped.

She tripped backwards, sneezing, plumes of smoke trickling through her ivory fangs. But she couldn't well run from herself—or, at least, from the things growing over her fur.

Spores, imperceptible to the naked eye, but like gleaming stars to my points of awareness. The houndspore, my newest evolution, pride of my Scorchplains.

Too long had my creatures been focused on aggression and dominance. It was time we had some more defensive plays come to my halls—and this scorch hound, eldest of her pack, still with the beast-tamer kobold trailing at her paws like a lovesick fool, was about to become the first of these new dangers.

Bristling, organic masses, like strange plated armour, molded over her back—not fully grown nor hardened, but certainly beginning to. They threaded through her fur, chains of grey-black, only her face free. She'd have to burn off some sections to keep up her mobility, twist her legs about and make sure their full range still kept, but there was a danger in how the armour settled around her back and the russet fur disappeared beneath grey.

In contrast to their delightful spores, the mushrooms themselves were far from pleasing to the eye. Their schema called them bulbous, but that was truly underselling it; instead of delicate gills of lace latticework and ghostly translucence, they were grotesque blobs of myconid flesh and rippling pores.

In a word, disgusting.

At least the smoke of the Scorchplains hid them to some serviceable degree. Tucked them under the grey and grime, their new larger form—some two feet across, though losing their height for misplaced lumps against the basalt—spidered over the pillars and wove around the bases. Not too many at the moment, a smattering around the various oases I'd carved into the floor, but they would grow. Not all of the spores would go to armour; doubtless I'd have a proper force on my hand before long. And each hound would wear a suit of defense against the threats.

I wanted an apex predator on this floor before I would begin to consider it done—whether that was an evolution of the scorch hounds or magma salamanders or hells, even the bounding deer, I didn't much care—and the hounds would need the armour to keep from becoming its prey. Evolutions would come for them soon, I thought, but that wouldn't be enough.

And that wasn't even the last of my evolutions. Though it had taken some time for this one, the others were lesser creatures—scuttling bugs. A handful of days was plenty for them to shed their Underranked forms and join the threats of my halls, far above in the Fungal Gardens—my many points of awareness I'd layered over the ring ever since, ah, completely forgetting to refill the mana rang the alarm, and my consciousness darted up to meet the new arrivals.

First was the edgewing dragonfly. I'd been entirely correct that its previous form, with its cracked chitin and gangly motions, had been an aquatic larvae—a nymph, I thought, why in the hells was it stealing the name of so many greater creatures—but the excellent thing about evolutions was that it could skip right over that step if it was so inclined. Which it rather was, as the glow over its transforming body died and a new beast emerged.

Long, perhaps a foot from bulbous eyes to curling tail, with four wings unfurling from its back with lacey veins and buzzing anticipation. Immediately they flung outwards, mana sharpening and strengthening them; from its schema, I could see that its previous form could shift and fold them back, but not this one. These were harder, more akin to blades than wings, for all it looked flight-ready. The edgewing dragonfly, unseen and unstoppable.

Uncanny mobility, its schema had said. And it certainly seemed to be living up to the standard; even now, in Nuvja's darkness, its set of four wings flicked up and picked it off the ground, swooping up as energy bled off its curling tail.

…still not a dragon. I would never understand why it thought it had earned that name.

But I would allow it down to the Skylands for now, and the eighth floor when I had the mana to continue growing the heart tree—already I could see it as a flying set of throwing knives, darting through the air to detach heads from shoulders at its leisure.

And, beside it, another glow faded as a further evolution took to the stage.

The cleaver ant.

My first second bug evolution, and I could already feel the power; it emerged from the light with a clicking hiss, clawed feet gripping onto stone, bulk pulsing through the air as mana snapped and ravaged through its channels. A monster proper, something that would serve as a proper threat instead of the ideal of one.

There was a part of me that wanted to immediately dig a tunnel down to the Skylands for it, get it to the colony that it had searched hard enough for it had evolved even without a drop of mana to feed on, but I stopped. I watched it, instead.

It was a beast of a thing, even as a bug—two, three, feet long, low and stocky, with the same earthen-brown carapace of its previous form but now with mandibles that belonged in a blacksmith's shop more than its face. Fierce and indomitable, powerful enough to punch through the armour of anything that dared stand against it. Even now, it clicked its mandibles together, and air rippled outward at the lazy motion—from a glance at its schema, I could see that it could use it as a repelling attack, generating enough force in a wave to push away prey and predators alike. A little monster.

Born from soldier ants separated from their colony, it lives a solitary and hungry life. Its namesake jaws cull all prey in its path as it devours more and more, searching for the power it needs to return to its queen.

I had evolved it erroneously—separated it from its colony, abandoned in the Fungal Gardens. It had developed a form that would allow it to survive the journey down.

I wouldn't deprive it of that. Oh, there would still be tunnels to get it around the Underlake instead of forcing it to try to learn to swim, but the adventure it would make for itself.

Cruel, perhaps. But it had evolved for this, and I had simply let it be for too long. Guiding it down easily, removing all of the struggle it had fought through, would be the height of an insult. No, it would become a master by itself.

Had Akkyst not grown more powerful by striving through the mountains, and Seros grown to hear the Song by venturing into the cove? Yes. This groundbreaker ant had evolved into a cleaver ant because it wanted to fight its way down to its queen—and I wouldn't make its journey an easy one and remove the reason it had fought. I would guide it in terms of direction, but it would have to survive.

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I pushed a map into its mind, a twisting path through the Drowned Forest and Jungle Labyrinth. It clicked its mandibles again, another rippling wave of force, and clambered its way out of the gladiatorial ring of insects. Almost immediately, the numerous luminous constrictors narrowed in on it, shadowthief rats eyeing the gleam of its carapace, lunar cave bears licking their fangs—but its mandibles were more powerful than the Fungal Gardens, and the inhabitants knew it. If they tussled with it, the chances were not in their favour.

Almost in unison, the edgewing dragonfly darted overhead, a gleaming blade in the darkness, and swept into the tunnel at the end. Fast as all hells, and twice as agile—I barely had time to give it a map of its own before it was halfway through the Drowned Forest. Once it hit the Skylands and the mess of clouds there, it would be unstoppable.

The Skylands, where one final evolution pulsed through and completed. The one I had been most excited over—the one that had completed much faster than I thought it would, actually. So long had she been gone from my halls that I had almost forgotten her presence, though never her—and now a new form awoke to wreak havoc.

The stormcaller sprite.

My wolf-wisp—hells, I couldn't call her that now, could I? But it worked so well—coalesced, from a glowing cloud to a creature again. Elementals were strange beasts, ones born entirely of mana and rather unknown to me, and seeing her go from wolf to cloud to wolf again was, ah, odd. Interesting. Unique.

But not as much as her new form.

Larger, a true wolf in size, and no longer limited to mist and steam. Still amorphous, changing and ephemeral, but with ice for claws and frost for fur. Cloud-command, mist-master; she erupted into the Skylands with a howl like distant thunder.

She had, apparently, decided four legs was a pathetic number to limit herself to—six at moments, eight at others, stretching up to ten whenever she hit a straightaway. She ran like a beast from the Dear War, faster than thought, existence; the entirety of the Skylands melted away as she awoke and took straight to the chase. She howled, and Khasvar's lightning surged to her call; it crackled through her flowing tail as twelve claws dug into the air and hurled her up, snapping fangs—actual fangs—into the wing of a greater pigeon.

She didn't kill it like mortal creatures; instead, the bird shrieked and warbled and hung limp in her jaws, colour bleaching from its feathers. Its mana disappeared into it, a live current, and she dropped its corpse once she was done with it. Vampiric, almost, just with mana instead of blood.

A monster. Gods, I loved her.

Her howls called storms, her fangs brought death. Oh, the little thief who thought himself important enough to strike an alliance would be safe only so long as he provided—the moment he slipped, the moment he failed, she would begin her hunt.

First a creator, whipping up the currents needed in my Underlake. She'd settled into a canine form just for running, just for carrying herself forward.

But now she had claws, and now she had hunger.

The other cloudskipper wisps would have someone new to learn from.

Four beautiful evolutions, all humming with power and potential; already I was imagining my heart tree alight with buzzing dragonflies to harass any who thought to climb its heights and prowling packs of scorch hounds with impenetrable armour. New ideas, new dreams.

It was a very welcome distraction, considering I was sheltering a brisk five points of mana in my core, even after the invasion this morning that hadn't made it past the Underlake before being spooked out. It turned out that digging some three thousand feet straight down and then widening it into a tower large enough to fill a faux jungle was, to put it lightly, difficult.

Particularly so when the bulk of my mana couldn't stay with me and had to instead go bobbing after Nicau, still winding their way through the Alómbra Mountains in hunt for his little Overlook. Hard to concentrate fully on a task when I had to traipse after a bumbling human and make sure he didn't impale himself on a stalagmite when I wasn't looking.

There was a suspicion in his thoughts, not at me, but more at his circumstances—the tiredness was returning, now that he walked free through the mountain, but he remembered its absence. Remembered how Abarossa's boon had felt, stripping away basal instincts to create a hunting power. I couldn't wait to see what he'd do without needing to waste half the day away unmoving.

Sea-drakes had the habit of sleeping for decades when they got peckish, letting their hoard refill their mana, but in my opinion, we'd bloody well earned it. Nicau, as a human, had not.

Further into the mountain, further into the fourth entrance to my dungeon, one that would stay hidden. I needed more schemas and I needed more information, and I had precious few Named to risk.

And precious little time to utilize.

Nenaigch's presence curled around me. Her side of the bargain, spooled free and nearly finished, and mine still unanswered—the webweavers were priests, in the most technical use of the term, but not up to her standards. Which was understandable. They were barely up to my standards, and I had no use of followers.

But in the depths of digging my eighth floor, I'd come up with an idea. My points of awareness swarmed back up to the fourth floor, to the tunnel carved off into its side, to the sarco crocodiles lazing in the center and lunar cave bears snacking on whitecap mushrooms. To the ghosts in the far back, settled on the needle-point shrine they'd woven in the back.

All the creatures in the Haven were toothless; they had to be, in order to keep from devastating all those mercurial beings I rather needed to reproduce. That meant that the webweavers had only so much to feast on, more surviving on mana than meat, considering only the weakest of bugs could be allowed.

They were subsidizing themselves on mostly gnats. A rather pitiful existence.

But I had done this before, and I had seen what happened when I fed small creatures smaller ones and hoped for the best.

So my plan was something parallel.

The webweavers were, to my conniption, actually rather smart. They operated under a hivemind, no identity beyond the one they served, and though I had built the idea of using dead vampiric mangroves as traps they had been the ones to execute it. Their flaw lay, inexplicably, that they saw me as their leader—and I was much too vast and powerful to bother directing them. So they walked in the same well-worn paths of my previous commands never struck out for anything bigger. They would worship Nenaigch, as I told them to do, but they would never innovate. Never expand.

Unless they had a larger voice to follow. Not as large as me, but larger than what they had.

A leader.

I'd gotten the idea from Veresai, because she was a budding gold-drake under the veneer of an empress serpent; though she was cruel and callous, it was impossible not to see the devastation she wrought over the Jungle Labyrinth and all the creatures under her command. Her horde had the most consistent evolutions of my dungeon, particularly with Kriya there to heal those injured.

So all I had to do was pick a webweaver and elevate it, make it smart enough to think for itself, and then extend that thinking to my commands and Nenaigch by proxy. A priest, without having to worry about kidnapping some pious fool from Calarata and just hoping they would convert to the goddess of weaving without any real say in the matter.

I trickled my points of awareness over the webweaver's shrine, the twisting mess of ghost-pale bodies and quivering threads. There—one near the center, larger than the others, currently digging its fangs into the twisting body of a gnat.

This one. This one would be the leader.