I let the last of the evolutions fade from my active control, mana spiraling out into my halls; already my improved regeneration rate felt like a breath of fresh air, pure mana unlike anything found naturally on Aiqith bright and vibrant through my control. Coral lingered on the back of my awareness, the schema ready to be used.

Which I could be using; my little faux plan for the sixth floor was ready to be set into action, to carve out a new home for the fledgling sea serpent and Seros to reign over, to create a reef with all the majesty that my memories reminded me of. Even if I couldn't go back to the ocean of my previous life, I could still bring it to me.

But not yet. For all that I'd finished choosing the evolutions, I still wasn't done—my halls were littered in bodies and debris beyond number, scattered all over the place without a single care for all the work I put into maintaining this place. Terribly rude.

But, well. When invaders came in, all brash and bold and idiotic, and cluttered up my gorgeous halls; they were cluttering it with things. Delicious, wonderful things delivered straight to my waiting grasp.

This had not been a particularly established horde, unfortunately, and I'd already noticed how many of them weren't particularly strapped in the way that I presumed dungeon delving groups tended to be. Ah well. Even the bare trinkets they wore were prizes nonetheless.

I rooted my way around the scattered corpses, slipping tendrils of mana through bloodstained armour and abandoned spell focuses. Creatures scattered from my heightened concentration, letting me meander my way through at my leisure. There wasn't a chance I would risk missing something of importance, because I knew damn well that if I didn't stake a claim on it, a burrowing rat with a greed far too big for its pitiful little body would be trying to drag the damn thing into its den.

And for all I encouraged their evolution, I would not allow them to steal from me.

So. Mine first.

I flitted my way around, points of awareness spiraling throughout my endless caverns. A few things jumped immediately out at me: underdressed and ill-prepared as they were, these were still adventurers, and mages didn't risk coming without—so numerous gems were littered over their bodies, tucked into pockets or strung up on either tasteful or crude jewelry. Most were those I'd already collected, but I found a beautiful little opal that hummed and glowed with air-attuned mana, so that was a lovely addition. That brought me up to eight different jewels I could reproduce, each with their own attunement; sapphire for water, ruby for fire, topaz for lightning, jet for shadow, jade for plants, rose quartz for healing, and now opal for air—alongside diamond for pure mana, and regular quartz for simple light. Quite a little haul, if I did say so myself. Once I had mana to spare, I would adorn my hoard room with more jewels.

The operative words being mana to spare. Considering I had many, many creatures to make, it would be a long while until I had any, but it was a pleasant thought for the future.

I dissolved down at least one of each to make sure I knew how to make them, and then left the rest for clever little rats to siphon away. With any luck, one would bring an opal down to the fourth floor; I wanted to see how the mage ratkin would respond to a newly introduced attunement. She was a delightfully clever little thing; though she had already chosen the jadestone as her attunement, would she be able to experiment with others?

I was very interested in seeing it.

Something else quickly caught my attention—one of my many, many gripes with invaders was that they didn't coordinate on what they brought in to help me. One would wear armour made from the skin of a creature but that was it; no bone, no flesh, no nothing that would actually allow me to gain their schema. Just scattered bits and pieces in a horrible mosaic that never went anywhere. One of these bastards had a handle on her dagger made of ivory, and as I dissolved it I got a taste of a massive, lumbering beast with leathery skin and the weight of a mountain—but with only ivory, it wasn't enough for a schema.

Can you even comprehend how infuriating that is? So desperately close to such a powerful schema, yet no way to properly obtain it?

So that made it all the sweeter when I noticed that one of the invaders—a bulky, strong-jawed woman with fists still splattered in gore—had modified her armour to have odd, ribcage-like protrusions extending over her chest. Clearly they'd done their job; things that hit her had their force redirected off of her more squishy organs, though that hadn't stopped the strike to the back of her head that had taken her to the ground, where other kobolds had been quick to finish the job.

But those protrusions weren't simple wood or metal; no, they were antlers.

I flew through my dungeon in a mad rush of speed; every corpse was investigated, a fraction dissolved just so I could know what they were made of, until– there. A body, bobbing through the Underlake, its leather armour drifting in Mayalle's current.

Leather armour with the same pattern as the antlers.

I ate them both, shoving the information together until they twined and combined and melded and shifted and joined and–

Click.

Bounding Deer (Common)

Traveling in herds, they flee at the slightest sign of danger with wild, extensive leaps, carrying them far from the threat. If needed, they can defend themselves with their branching antlers, but they much prefer to run.

Ah. A coward. Not fantastic, but very welcome otherwise; so far, most of my prey species had been little, scuttling things, and with the new evolutions racing through my halls, I would need larger meals. Deer certainly seemed to fit those requirements.

And besides, it felt absolutely wonderful to finally receive a schema from invaders. I had taken the bloodline kelp from a fossil the merrow brought in and Nicau had brought me the greater pigeon, but this one was all mine.

If just to spite me, no other invaders had appropriately matching pieces. Plenty of singular sets, but of course, nothing else. The bastards.

They did have other prizes, though; on a strangely necrotic finger, a ring made of a deep blue-black metal lurked, sucking the light away from anything near it and even tugging oddly on my mana. I examined it from a distance, peering at the runes carved over its surface; nothing I recognized, but something shivered in my core regardless; a pale sort of recognition, something deeper than what I was consciously aware of.

The man wearing it seemed normal enough; tall but pressingly thin, bones pressing through his skin, what was left of his eyes sunken into his face and his jawbone protruding hollowly. A gaunt fellow, his teeth pitch black. The fledgling sea serpent had ripped him apart, and I didn't have any precise memories of how he'd fought.

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The ring wasn't normal, though. I'd be investigating that.

Another woman had a staff, old, gnarled wood that gleamed with some sort of enchantment; nothing I could piece together by merely looking at it, but certainly the type that I could break apart and see what it was. I shifted the earth underneath it to shove it away from the corpse it had been next to, doing the same for the runes. I didn't have Seros to deliver things down a floor so this would have to do for now, though I would have to protect them in the time being so none of my creatures got any interesting ideas about the mana sources.

Still, though.

For all that I had been a collector in my past life, I'd been rather content to fill that void with creatures and schemas and floors beyond splendor—but I couldn't deny the pleased little quiver of my mana as I beheld the new treasures that I would be displaying in my hoard room. When Seros woke up and could properly watch over my halls again, I would fully investigate the mysteries of those artefacts; what magic did they hold, and how could I take it? The ring stunk of something dark and twisted, the staff more straightforward, and the…

I paused.

There had been a… sword, hadn't there?

I did not like that question.

Points of awareness bloomed into existence as I spread my gaze far and wide over the Drowned Forest, peering under every clump of billowing moss and every knotted mess of vampiric mangrove roots; but for all that corpses sat demure and lifeless, hands open and outstretched, their grips stayed empty.

There had been a sword, I was positive. It had been similar to the staff, baseline metal glimmering with a hidden enchantment, and I'd watched to save it to examine it further and see if I could replicate whatever ability it had for my own weapons. The woman who'd had it had died a messy, bloody death pinned down by ironback toads—but now her corpse sat, alone.

Alone.

Hadn't there been ironback toad bodies surrounding her?

I wasn't infallible, as much as I would forever deny that fact, and today had certainly been the type of clusterfuck that led to me missing things, but I couldn't shake the quiet little feeling that she'd had a sword and she'd killed two of the ironback toads, and now neither were here. But there were plenty of creatures in my halls; maybe they had just been eaten? I could see the kobolds dragging back the essentially free food for their deplenished numbers.

The sword, though. I'd wanted that sword, and it was gone.

Maybe it would turn up later.

I had too much to do to focus on it now; later, always later. I had a lot of things to do later. One of the many curses of going from managing one body, though elaborate and complex, to suddenly managing thousands.

Planning, though. I'd keep the corpses on the first two floors for a while longer, let my creatures eat their fill and see their victory as I stored the last little mana from the invasion in their bodies. Tomorrow, when I started to carve out the sixth floor, I'd dissolve them for the boost, but I was feeling rather indulgent. It wasn't often that my creatures got to eat invaders, and that was a source of mana that even my own creations couldn't hope to match.

The same, unfortunately, could not be done for the Underlake. Leaving corpses just bobbing along would only foul the water, and I still had too much lingering fury over the saltwater incident to ever let that happen.

Dozens of bodies dissolved into fragile motes of light, flitting back to my core as the emptiness that had been creeping along the edges of my awareness fled; a corpse wasn't worth nearly as much as a soul and each only provided mere flecks, but with the near two dozen bodies in the Underlake, it was enough to push me up to fifty points.

And while that certainly wasn't endless, it was enough for me to rationalize using almost all of it.

Most, if not all, of my most powerful creatures were slumbering away under the glow of evolution; if any invaders came in now, my halls were still at a little over half of the population they'd been before, though they were rebuilding quickly enough. Sheer numbers could take them down, but if someone suitably powerful enough came in, they could bulldoze past my first two floors, and that was if they weren't a merrow and just entered the Underlake straight away.

The armoured jawfish and fledgling sea serpent would make mincemeat of anyone who dared, but, well. Just in case.

I reached deep, gathered my mana, and shaped a sarco crocodile.

Thirty points fled from my command, immediately reducing me back to the scraps needed to keep my populations up, but the water bucked and spiraled as a new form forced itself into their midst; pebbled green-grey scales, enormous jaws, the body of a tank and the tail of a battering ram–

She emerged from the cocoon of her creation with a deep, earth-shaking roar. Her clawed feet splayed, pushing her up to the surface to inhale, the denizens of the Underlake fleeing from her enormous shadow.

Not as enormous as I remembered, though. My previous sarco had grown over his time under my care, immense and profound and unbelievably sized; now I was back to their starting size, her channels empty of mana, nowhere near full.

My previous sarco had been closing in on evolution. Now I would never get to see what he could become.

I shoved those thoughts aside as I watched the newest addition to my dungeon. There was a time for mourning, and it wasn't now; I would wait for a quiet evening, when I could talk to Seros about all that had happened, and there were too many things to do still. So I would wait.

She hauled herself out of the water, droplets glittering on the edge of her scales, and sprawled beneath the quartz-light I'd installed over the entrance down to the fourth floor; there she sat, staring into the water below, tasting the air with brand new lungs and swishing her enormous tail. Perhaps a little less lazy than her predecessor, if the bare gleam of her thoughts said anything. I'd take that.

She'd also made the right move to get out of the water as she adjusted to her new existence; already the fledgling sea serpent and armoured jawfish could sense the latest addition to their waters, and their thoughts were decidedly about fighting. Which.

Not what I needed for a line of defense. Just a little cooperation wouldn't kill them. Maybe.

Maybe it would take a draconic monitor to beat them all into submission.

Oh, I couldn't wait for Seros to finish evolving. He was going to be a legend.

But with the sarco now in place, the rest of my creatures still celebrating off the last of their victory and standing proud over the bodies of their enemies, I felt something stir in my core.

Because we'd won.

Fifty invaders had marched into my halls like they were going to defeat me, like they were going to kill my creatures and burn my plants and take my core; and they hadn't. With brawn and mind and mana, we had stopped them, crushed them down beneath our claws, and we had won.

Calarata had killed me before. Still my corpse sat somewhere in that city of thieves, and still the Dread Pirate probably clapped himself on his back and preened over his shitty little magic. Still these invaders came, thinking themselves so clever and wonderful and strong, and still they would continue to come.

But even despite all of that, despite everything they had thrown at me, I was still here.

How long had it been since I'd expelled my own heart out into the wider world? Since I'd harvested bare little whitecap mushrooms and green algae and waited patiently for a lone cave spider to fall prey to my primitive trap? Since Seros had been the only one at my side and a single unarmed orphan had been enough to nearly destroy me?

And now I survived full frontal assaults and not only won, but thrived. Dozens of new evolutions ready to unleash new powers over all the wayward little fools that dared invade my halls, new floors in preparation for new creatures and new adaptations and new godly boons, power and potential and vicious, burning pride.

I had died, yes. That was an unfortunately permanent condition that many mortal creatures suffered—but I didn't. Because I'd died, but I had refused to die forever, and now I was climbing the heights towards a strength I had never had before. My halls were filled with beasts Aiqith had never had the pleasure of seeing before—Seros, the empress serpent, Rihsu, Chieftess, Nicau, from the largest roughwater shark to the smallest swarming wasp. All of them were mine.

And with them by my side, well.

How much further could I go?

I curled my points of awareness around Seros, able to feel the deep rumble of his breath even past the light of evolution. Draconic monitor he would soon be, still seabound, still Named, and full dragon perhaps in the distant future; except it wasn't distant, not anymore. Those in my halls would thrive beyond anything that the apathetic world could muster.

Because I was a sea-drake, was a dungeon, and there was nothing that could stop me.