Now that I'd upgraded from a molehill to a proper cavern, it was time to make it my own.

As rightly pissed as I was about the horrible asymmetry, there were benefits; the largest being that my twin little entrances were still close together but tucked in a back section, an outcropping shadowing on their left side. I tugged up a spool of mana and grew the outcropping, sprawling it out into a tunneled half-wall with a mighty fine inner thread of granite just in case any invader got a touch too big for their britches and wanted to break it down. Because I was rather against the idea, thank you.

In the end, the two entrances emerged into a dark enclosed space, forcing out on either the far left or right where they would then enter the cavern proper—but when they went into the larger space and looked back, they wouldn't see their entrances, just another stretch of stone. And if there were some distractions, say, armies of pissed critters and hungry beasts, they probably wouldn't have the time to dutifully search every nook and cranny for their way out.

Because that was what my first floor was for. Even with its new size and the new dangers I planned to throw into its midst, I didn't want it to be a threat to invaders first arriving. A couple stone-backed toads, a few luminous constrictors; basic monsters enough to soothe their concerns and make them think I was a foolish little dungeon with no threats. The bears would stay tucked in their dens, any other creatures would stay asleep—until invaders tried to come back through on a retreat.

Because they would find themselves lost, panicked, and utterly beset by the floor they had written off as easy.

Sometimes I was rather proud of my ferocity.

Of course, I was hardly done now. I darted about the cavern, shoring up walls and carving hundreds of dens over their base. Not all of them were nice, or even particularly pleasant—I wasn't a complete hatchling over my creatures. They would have to fight for comfort in my halls.

Even if the lowest den was still a vast improvement over the scraps they'd found in the outer mountain. My creatures needed their strength up if they were going to evolve.

I meandered my way around the newly widened space, dropping spores like raindrops in my wake; whole new gardens sprouted, unfurling pale caps and algae slithering outward until once more the silver-grey of the limestone was fully hidden under the greens and whites of my Fungal Gardens.

Truly, you cannot understand how badly I wanted to try and complete the floor now, watching my creatures get over their hesitancy and start to once more live in the space I'd provided for them, dangerous little beasties. But no. I would wait for Nicau to return and give me all manner of new creatures and plants, just to make sure the space was ready. As perfect as I could get it.

And not finishing it immediately would let me hold out just a little longer before starting my sixth floor, because I still didn't have enough creatures to fill it like I wanted. Gods knew that I was still struggling to fill the Skylands. Truly, any distraction from the desire to start a new floor was very necessary for my fragile self control to win out.

And there were a few more things I could do.

I bumped the population of the cave spiders and silverheads up to unseen levels, until the walls crawled red with scuttling little things and the still slowly-filling rock pond flashed silver with thrashing bodies. They were still the backbone of this ecosystem, feeding everything that didn't eat other little bugs, and I'd set up my floors in such a way that there was no worry of overpopulation; when there got to be too many for the mushroom or prey to sustain, they could just go down to a further floor.

My dungeon still needed to masquerade as an ecosystem in order to sustain itself, but it wasn't nearly as fragile when I could step in at any time to help smooth over any rough patches. A regular mountain could be immediately destroyed by one too many luminous constrictors; I could rest easy knowing that the competition would just drive them down.

And speaking of competition—there were two other creatures on this floor I did need to manage a little more closely.

The twin cave bears had barely even noticed as I'd changed the floor around them, slumbering in their individual dens with nary a twitch. Lazy brutes.

Lazy large brutes, however. I poked back into the original schema, from all the way back when Seros had still been an underground monitor; when I'd first claimed this pattern, it'd been called the juvenile lunar cave bear.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

From just a glance, I could tell that these two were juvenile no longer. Certainly not at their full size, especially considering their description said that they didn't have a known full size, but they were clambering their way into adulthood. Their shoulders were broader, paws even more massive, fangs spilling from their drooling lips. True beasts now, actually dangerous and built for fighting. The male was still practicing his shadow magic, able to fully cloak himself as nothing more than a slight discolouration against the back wall, though he paid for that in the numerous scars crisscrossing over his back from the female honing her more combative skills. She was easily his size over again, absolutely rippling with muscle, with keen eyes and a hunger for blood. Several of the more jewel-interested rats had taken to following the male around, watching every time he cast magic with wide eyes.

A little fan club. Truly impressive.

I very carefully shifted the stone beneath them, shuffling them back into their new positions as I expanded their dens, accommodating their new size while giving them room to grow; because as much as they tried to destroy each other on a near-daily basis, my mana-sense told me there was a litter on the way. So it looked like my first floor would be getting a touch more of a defense in the coming days.

But in order for that defense to work, I needed to make sure those bloody invaders stayed on the floor long enough to get crushed by it.

I did have a few ideas for that, though.

The first of which I took inspiration from Nicau from—when he had pledged himself to me, stuttering and nervous though he was, his desire to live had only been half of it. The other, far more present half had been his greed, for power, for status. And even before then, when he had sent group after group into my fatal depths just for a chance at their position; and then there had been the nightmarketers, who had only invaded me to steal my creatures and sell them, Aloma and the jewels she'd tried to steal, the merrow conspiring to steal my wisp even as they tried to reclaim their lost staff.

Dungeons were used for training, for strengthening magic; from the memories I'd scoured from my stolen souls I knew they could also be used to find creatures to bond as companions, gathering rare potion ingredients, even capturing the core and binding it to service. But all of those reasonings were brought by greed, by the lust for power and material goods. Something that I could provide.

With the notable exception of letting them bind me to their service. That would not be on the list of proffered temptations, funnily enough.

But jewels I could provide aplenty, already using them myself to keep a steady back up of mana for when invaders were rude enough to steal my ambient supply, and it wasn't like I was about to stop creating unique and powerful creatures. More plants, more floors, more ecosystems; plenty to steal.

Just unfortunately for the thieves, they wouldn't be leaving with any of the shinies they'd try to claim for themselves. I dug deep into my stolen souls and pried loose what attracted them; and all about my Fungal Gardens I hung great strands of jewels, shimmering little treasures—although unfortunately not diamonds, given they were too mana-expensive for me to use as set dressing. Veins of pure silver and gold streaked their way around growths of algae-light, glinting in the darkness, and I wrapped patches of granite around them to make them pop even more.

Now for the creatures; I carved little dens directly at eyesight, filling them with soft algae and gentle trickles of water from above.

Some part of me was inspired; I dug deep into the schema of my luminous constrictor and tugged out just the bones, learning all of their skeletal structure. Taking a page out of the sarco's book, I cleared a winding section free of algae that started halfway up the wall and trailed overhead, winding between several stalactites and ribboning its way for easily sixty straight feet. Then I expanded the serpent's skeleton to true massive proportions and inlaid it into the limestone, its jaws expanded as if about to take a bite right at the tip of a stalactite.

A welcoming little beast. Perhaps not entirely useful for my weak first floor appearance, but given that it looked like just a fossil, hopefully the Resurrector title wasn't common enough that people would expect me to have it as a schema.

Of course, I immediately tried to use said Resurrector title to bring back this enormous serpent, but even as I snaked my mana throughout the bones, it simply refused to activate. Figured.

It would be far too easy for me to just make incredibly powerful creatures by messing with their bones and bringing them back to life, so I could understand why the gods had restricted that particular little ability, but it wasn't as if I wasn't annoyed.

But now, with my welcoming faux fossil and a floor littered in fungus, I could feel it was approaching done.

The rock pond was still filling the rest of the way, meaning the silverheads were a little cramped for the moment, but their numbers would settle as the weak died and luminous constrictors ate the foolhardy. I predicted several hundred more webs to spring up as the newest generation of cave spiders fought for territory, the whitecap mushrooms shriveling as more burrowing rats ate their number down. It would be a few days of upheaval, and that was before Nicau returned and gave me all manner of new beasts to fill my halls.

Then the Fungal Gardens would be complete.

As soon as Nicau got off his ass, wherever he was, and brought me back some schemas.