I paused. Blinked. Read that again.

The message, unlike last time someone above had offered me the equivalent of a golden carrot, didn't change.

I took another moment of sitting there, rather stunned, before reaching for the intangible thing beyond the message.

It wasn't a list, not like choosing an Otherworld schema; instead it felt vaguely like someone had reached down and plucked off the top of my head like a jar's lid, opening over seams I hadn't known were there. Some part of me glanced up and there was endless there, endless space and endless time and endless presence, just endless, stretching over into the furthest reaches of the universe. Quite easy to get lost in, really.

And in that endless, gods lingered.

Spread out, only faintly there in a bubble-esque state, they loomed overhead as just a fraction of their attention came down to me. I reached out in tandem and felt their influence slide over me, felt the raw prick of their power as they impressed upon me how they would claim domain over my Drowned Forest, giving it a fraction of their power to serve fit. But just a spark would already be power beyond my capabilities, far past what I had access to. A blessing for only one floor, to be specific, not leaking into the others unless I gave the god domain over those as well, but.

Still so much of a good thing I couldn't help but cough uncomfortably.

I wasn't exactly a fan of insulting the gods—clearly they'd had some hand in my rebirth, whether being the instigators or the ones who had allowed the spell to go through—but when a deal was too good to be true, it often was.

I extended—with the utmost head-bobbing and flattery and general yellow-bellied groveling that drove daggers through my pride, you must understand—a hesitant question to those godly bubbles up above.

With a touch of raw amusement, one of them—a goddess whose magic stank of fired sand, the smell of rain off glass—flicked an answer back at my core.

Ah. They would also have some measure of demands for me; the ability to store wayward souls within my halls if need be and some nondescript requests that I would be compensated for but very much expected to complete, alongside giving the god an access point for their mana to reach the world. Similar to my Otherworld connection, really, just opening another semi-entrance to fill Aiqith with more mana.

Because in the end, that was what it came down to. Gods had three ways of influencing Aiqith: through their priests, who gained access to near limitless potential in return for serving an oath; through their more general worship, where they could extend small favours or punishments to their followers; and their domains, where they could freely spread their mana in hopes that some creature would wander by and start serving them.

But a god couldn't just claim a random section of the woods; for one, no traffic meant it'd be a pretty shitty use of their mana, and for a second, they couldn't just pop on down to Aiqith. Even in their weakened form, they would rend the earth and tear the heavens and all manners of nasty, unwelcome things. They needed a gate.

One that dungeons were uniquely suited to provide. Already they had an Otherworld connection they maintained, they had high numbers of potential worshippers traversing through, and perhaps most important of all, they could have beautiful halls that the god would be able to claim.

Bragging rights, of a sort. Maybe the gods got together every few months and chatted about the various dungeon levels they had domain over in a way of a pissing competition.

Though I couldn't help but notice that out of the thousands upon thousands of various gods, only around a dozen were extending patronage offers. My floor not up to your liking, lords?

Ah. Bad thoughts. Keep civil in their presence and all that.

And it was most definitely a presence. I didn't have the greatest grasp of it all but I could sense that time was, if not stopped, than at least slowed; and I also sensed that this wasn't exactly the decision that I could let simmer in the back of my mind while I worked. If I tried to leave, think about it, and then come back, I imagined I'd find even fewer gods willing to work with me.

It still seemed too good to be true, but ah well. I couldn't afford to turn down more power now.

I looked through all the bubbles.

In one, a minor deity of a certain river somewhere not even on this continent showed me the potential of my canals; I saw them leaping and thrashing over invisible rapids, tearing unwary foes down to depths far more crushing than their actual size would merit. A lady of fireflies who would fill my halls with numerous, impossible glowing lights, dazzling invaders and guiding my creatures to their prey. One halfhearted display of replacing all the walls in my forest with midnight-black obsidian. Another sent my canals bubbling, boiling with restrained heat.

All deeply inviting. But my gaze was drawn to one in the back.

Of all the options, this one seemed the most tailored to my halls specifically, not just replacing stone or creating balls of light. The vision showed me my plants, the whitecaps and moss and algae but most specifically the mangroves, and shifted beneath the stony soil to show me their roots.

Their massive, spreading, connected roots. I saw a burrowing rat step unwarily onto a frond of billowing moss and a ripple spread out, mana sparking through every other root until each plant in my hall knew of the creature, where it was, where it was going, and the closest mangrove tree fucking moved as it shifted a branch lower to hopefully catch the fool.

Rhoborh, God of Symbiosis. A minor deity, to be sure. I doubted he'd be putting as much time into planning out his boon for me if he had the power to tempt however many other dungeons there were out there. His presence rolled over me like the feeling of moss, the rumble of flora and fauna working in harmony. Not unpleasant.

I spared one last glance back at the unfortunately also very nice offering of bone-like spikes that would grow freely from my walls and floor every time blood was spilled, but I needed more planning. More intelligence.

And a floor-wide alarm system would never go amiss.

I felt Rhoborh sort of… smile, in a sense? He didn't have a corporeal body, at least not one I was privy to see, but the redwoods of his smell seemed to freshen a bit.

Then his power coursed through me and out onto my second floor.

Everywhere it touched, plants and animals straightened, a spark of adrenaline in their eyes; mangroves unfurled new leaves that had been only halfway to bud and burrowing rats poked their heads out of dens as fear washed away. It settled deep into the stone of the place, lining the canals, crawling up the walls, bringing an otherworldly sense of being much older than these caverns had been just a minute ago.

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And beneath it all grew roots.

Fine, grasping mycelium of mushrooms; the deep, threading maze of mangroves; the twist and defensive heaps that made up moss. Each grew and grew until they happened to brush against the other, then kept growing in the opposite direction, weaving endlessly through the stone.

And I saw what an expanded consciousness brought.

Billowing moss always moved in an effervescent wind but now it seemed to poke up with deliberation, extending its leafy fronds to slither over the ground. Whitecaps angled themselves away from the algae-light, lacecaps oozed more digestive fluid over flies caught in their web, and the mangroves rumbled and groaned as they shifted, bringing branches low and tensed. The air filled with the faint hum of their communication.

Oho. Glorious.

I felt Rhoborh fade away as his mana spread through my halls, not quite replacing my own ambiance but certainly contending with it. Of course. It'd be too handy to have a god at my beck and call, though I did my best to send general thoughts of pleases and thank-yous as he left back to whatever gods did when they weren't terrorizing mortals.

But holy shit.

Blessing of a god.

Hard not to be humbled by that.

I could feel that it would take a while for his blessing to truly settle into the floor, letting the plants utilize their new connection to its fullest potential. But already I couldn't wait to see where it went. Gods, I'd just given my plants some real minds to think with—shared minds, of course, because it took all of them connecting to have enough collective neurons to start making choices—but that didn't matter. One step infinitely further than I'd gotten.

You know, I enjoyed that quite enough I wouldn't mind doing it again.

I darted back up to my first floor, to the quiet rasp of scales on stone and the buzz of endless insects. I gathered my mana around me, letting it diffuse through the floor, closing my metaphorical eyes–

Fungal Gardens.

Nothing happened.

Twin reasonings, I could guess—the floor wasn't completed yet, not to my standards, and my mana knew it. No point in giving a name to a half-baked creation.

And none of the gods wanted to claim it as a domain.

Pricks.

Just to be absolutely sure, I flew down to the third. Underlake brought nothing but the endless darting of the cloudskipper wisp.

Well. No one could say I hadn't tried.

-

The silver krait paused almost hesitantly at the edge of the canal, peering into the shifting waters below. He'd leapt at the chance before, swimming down to aid in the merrow fight, but I supposed it was different now that it could potentially be his new home.

Up until he needed to come up to breath air, but that wouldn't be common. His newly-improved lung capacity worked wonders.

He was easily twelve feet long, though had traded his previous bulk for a much thinner, more streamlined body. His tail had a wide, paddle-shaped fin, almost like an extended dorsal fin, and already he was moving awkwardly on land where he'd once slithered freely. His scales had shifted to a beautiful pale silver speckled with asymmetrical white splotches, so that he would look like nothing but a flash of passing sunlight in the water. A perfect ambush predator.

With a deep inhalation that inflated him to near double his normal size, the krait finally pushed off the soil and slipped into the canal.

Immediately, I could feel his joy. What had once been clumsy, horrible swimming now came as naturally as breathing—relatively speaking, considering he still couldn't do that underwater—and his new prowess was evident. He darted past the den of an electric eel before the poor thing had the chance to zap him and shot down the tunnel into the third floor, twisting merrily and darted right for the fledgling kelp forest to entertain himself by swimming around their leaves.

I'd dug a few smaller tunnels from the ceiling of the third floor and connected them to dens of the Drowned Forest; not enough for anything larger than a stone-backed toad to get through, but enough that fresh air would maintain a constant flow. And who knew? Maybe a rat or toad would get adventurous enough to test their mettle in the water.

They'd either die spectacularly or discover a new evolution. A win-win, really. I needed new schemas.

I hadn't actually gotten any new creatures through the entrance yet, though. An uncomfortable thought; half the reason why I'd been content to not try and shave off a piece of my third floor and try to close it was my lingering hope of all the new creatures I'd get through its opening.

But at the same time, the merrows had opened said tunnel by blasting through solid rock. If I were any form of beastly little shark, I'd certainly wait more than three days before investigating.

I wafted a bit more mana inticingly near the entrance, though.

Better to be safe than sorry.

-

Brus was, to put it politely, shit out of luck.

It'd been over a week since Chelle and her merrow friend had upended their purses for a single stone-backed toad, more money than he'd ever earned running two-bit deals with Lália and Nil for whatever exotic scraps could be found around Calarata. That was the problem with a pirate city, he was finding; too many pirates. There was nothing he could try and sell that a more experienced nightmarketer wasn't already doing.

Nothing, of course, except a dungeon.

But Brus hadn't been the man with the plan when it came to their trio. Nil had scoped out their missions, Lália had found the sellers, and he'd been the muscle. Half the reason he'd been the only one to survive their little encounter.

Muscle didn't help when trying to find someone willing to pay him piles upon piles of gold for the location of a dungeon.

Moreover, what did he even want from the deal? To start his own Adventurer's Guild? Every dungeon had one, he knew that—their trio had adventured in High Lord Thiago's dungeon a handful of times when they were still getting their feet beneath them, staying on the first two floors and only gathering what they could afford to slay. The Guild had been the one to screen them, to allow them entry, and to collect a fat fucking percentage of what they carried out.

A pretty nice gig, all things considered. Brus could easily imagine himself in a nice frock coat, high collar and all, running his hands over newly-slain creatures as he chose the best pickings for himself. He'd never have to work another day in his life if he became the Guildmaster.

Yes. That was what he wanted.

Now he just had to convince other people to fill in the rest of the Guild, somehow get the ball rolling underneath the Dread Pirate's nose, and then start making a tidy profit.

The shit out of luck he'd found himself in seemed both very far away and still very close.

He'd avoided telling anyone about the dungeon for fear of someone stealing the prize from him, a very real threat in a lawless city, but that had to change. The money had already been wasted on pretty drinks and prettier girls, and he didn't have any other jobs to fall back on. Gods know he wasn't about to go become a pigeoncatcher down on the docks.

No, he had a dungeon, and he was going to rule it.

Mind made up, he uncurled himself from the little alley he'd tucked away in, right next to the Center Plaza. The jumbled mess of market stalls and merchants hawking their wares at high noon echoed right past the rickety wooden wall he had his back against; surely someone who would listen, who would give him all the power he wanted. He had a dungeon.

Brus exhaled, turned to face the Plaza, and promptly froze.

Not of his own accord, leg quivering as he tried to take a step forward; but shadows crept from the surrounding wall and slithered up his boot, gentle and cloying and impossibly strong. "The fuck?" He murmured, reaching down to tug on his knee.

The shadows captured one leg, two, and reached up to twine merrily around his fingers. It was bitingly cold.

"Brus Lamaça Famón?"

His full name echoed in the pressingly quiet alley. He twisted, as best the shadows allowed.

A man strode towards him, smile bright on his tanned caramel face and black hair pulled back in a loose ponytail. Dark clothing, all high, gold-studded boots and buttons, waistcoat flaring at his hips in an intangible breeze. He moved with all the casual manner of someone who owned the place. Which. Ah.

He did.

Varcís Bilaro, the Dread Pirate, Lord of Calarata, Keeper of the Underthings, smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.

"I've been meaning to talk with you."