The emotional high that I was feeling gradually settled down with the death of the intruder. I saw the Essence of the Lynx rise and split into many streams and enter my creatures, with the fox receiving the biggest portion. Hmmm interesting does this mean that my creatures also become stronger by killing the organisms of this world realm. Sigh, If only I could see their status screen like my own.

Status Screen (Basic)

Name :

(Unnamed)

Age :

7 hours

Gender:

Female

Species:

Red Fox

Level :

G

XP (Experience) :

68/100

HP (Health Points) :

73/100

SP (Stamina Points) :

57/100

INT (Intelligence):

F

END (Endurance):

G

STR (Strength) :

G

AGI (Agility) :

F

Status: inebriated

Oh, so I can see the status of my creatures.. Wonderful!!! Huh, however it seems that I can not get a detailed explanation for their screen which is unlike mine. Is this because their status screen is basic? Why is it basic anyway? Didn't I create them, so shouldn't they be visible to me? Is it the same reason as to why I could not feel them once they left my dungeon? Does that mean they are part of me in my dungeon, but not once they leave it? Hmmm how does that work? How can they be both me and still not me???......

After contemplating this perplexing scenario for a while and still not reaching a satisfactory answer, I perceived that I might be still missing some vital information. Putting aside my thoughts for another time, I tried to make sense of the data given in the screen of my Red Fox.

Let me name you Foxxy first. Soo, Level, XP and INT should have the same function as me. However what are all these other attributes that I have never heard of before. Do all organisms have different attributes? Hmmm…. So, strength and Agility seem self-evident.

HP and SP are ticking up slowly. Health Point, I can somewhat understand I guess. Foxxy has currently many bleeding scratches all over its body, and the value being seventy three should be due to this. Does that mean that at its healthy state it was at one hundred?

So then similarly these Stamina Points should be the stamina of the creature. The SP is ticking up, much faster than the HP, why is that?? Hmmmm… is this because it is resting right now, however it does not have good regeneration?.

Foxxy, run a circle around the trees at your fastest speed. I told her. I saw her SP decreasing as she ran. Okay you can stop. I told her. I could ascertain now that energy expenditure reduces SP. To ascertain that I got HP right, I told an Owl to go and attack Foxxy on her wounds. The moment the claws scraped over the wounds, five points of HP reduced in the screen, at the same time I saw Foxxy hiss at the owl, jumping into the air to attack it back. Obviously the owl was prepared and outmanoeuvred her claws, flying over her to land on a tree branch. She started whining and I sensed a feeling of betrayal directed towards me. Huh, what did I do?!? Whatever. Moving on, I guess the final attribute END should have some similar effects to DEF. Since there does not seem to be any way to verify it right now, I will wait and see.

I checked the status screens of a few more critters from my dungeon, but most of them had more or less the same attributes as Foxxy. I noticed that all the creatures which received an injection of essence previously now had higher XP and sometimes even an attribute rank up more then all the critters which did not. And only the critters, which did any significant damage to the lynx received any essence, in proportion to the damage they did. It also seemed that my different attributes were the outlier and not the norm.

After organising everything I learnt until now in my head, I decided to go back to landscaping my floor. Drawing upon my previous experience from the lynx, it was seen that a flat or even slightly slanting floor was easy for world realm organisms to traverse over. Hence my cavern required more than just a slight dip in the centre.

As it seems too easy to reach the corridor from the cavern entrance, I decided to leave a ledge for creatures to walk on and cut away the rest of the ground and make the cavern floor even deeper. I would leave a few paths for my creatures to go to the next room but everything else should be cliffs. Hence I left a 3 metre wide ledge on the cavern walls with the corridor in the centre and started converting the rest of the soil into mana . I also decided to hide the entrance to the corridor with rocky outcrops, so that it would not be immediately visible from the Cavern entrance. I could leave blood sucking vines hanging from the cliffs near the corridor for extra protection maybe. Maybe I should make it as a deadend there, so that anybody moving in a straight line towards the corridor can be herded together and killed? Liking the idea immensely, I left the area of fifteen metres perpendicular to the corridor, in front of the cliffs bare and started compressing the solid to make a rocky mountainous landscape on each side of the fifteen metre wide clearing.

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When I was done with my little kill zone project, I had two rocky hills around twenty and thirty metres high jutting out from the back walls of my cavern. Both of them had rather steep slopes to the sides that were facing each other, that is towards my kill zone. Along with the perpendicular ten metre tall cliffs from my previous ledge connecting the two hills and the rocky outcropping on the ledge for hiding my corridor, my dead end looked as if a giant had scooped out the middle of a mountain turing it into two hill and a valley in between.

I drilled three metre high holes into the junction where the hill connected to the cavern walls and ledges and were thereby cutting off the path to the corridor. After finishing up on the archways which I cut into my hills and extending the cliffs on the back wall on both sides of the hills a bit more I made them slope down on a much gentler rate.

By the time I was done with the rear end of the cavern, I had a corridor half hidden by rock outcroppings around ten metres above the current cavern floor level. A ledge ran through the entire rear end of the cavern, making steep cliffs in the area directly in front of the corridor and punching through the hills on both sides of the corridor and finally curving and sloping down towards the centre of the cavern till the previous floor level dropped by another ten metres. Thus, now my creatures could get on the cliff from both sides of the room and walk through the holes in the hills to reach the cliff with the outcropping in front of the corridor.

I kept my previous idea for the front half of the cavern, by gently sloping up the ten metre drop in floor level towards the cavern entrance. I also kept the thicket in the centre as it was, so that the centre of the cavern now had another hill ten metre tall, with a twenty square metre copse of pine trees on top. Hence, except for the addition of ten metres in depth, changing the highest point of my cavern from sixty to seventy metre, all the other dimensions remained the same.

I decided to change all my soil to magical soil for the future plants my creatures might bring me. I also added a bit of the shiny mineral - Aragonite whose blueprint I received, from when I converted the soil to mana, into my cavern walls to make my walls sparkly.

While I was thinking about what further changes I needed to make to add a brook to my cavern, the first of my creatures started coming back from the outside world. The next few hours were spent with me producing magical soil and sparkly caverns. My creatures also started coming back bringing with them numerous new blueprints. I received all sorts of insects, seeds and fruits, uprooted plants, small rodents, a few types of reptiles and even small mammals and birds. With the cacophony of blueprint notifications in the background, I experimented on how to make a running brook work for my floor.

Making simple water was easy, just a conversion of mana into water, however to keep the water running without any effort on my part was a whole other ballgame. I went back to my abilities to check out if there were any that met my requirement.

Environmental Manipulation:

The Dungeon Core has control over the dungeon's environment, including lighting, temperature, and atmospheric conditions. It can create dynamic and immersive settings.

The Ability environmental manipulation seemed to be able to fulfil it and even add light. I just did not know how to. It says I have control over these things, but how? How can I control them… Hmmm… I control my creatures with my thoughts, by commanding them. Will this work for this ability? Although, how could it, the floor is not a living thing with consciousness for me to command. Or maybe it is? My floors are enclosed spaces with me in total control of everything inside of it. Although I thought of my floors as mine since I created them, maybe they are literally a part of my body. Are they like my creatures, part of me and yet separate entities, or am I permanently connected with my floor and we are one entity? Will I die when taken out of my dungeon? Or does my core survive and the dungeon dies maybe? Or is it the other way around and my core dies but my dungeon survives? No, my instincts tell me that the core is the centre of my life. I am not sure whether I can survive only as a core form without my dungeon from now onwards, but the dungeon will definitely be unable to function without me. Is that why I felt a spike in emotions when the Lynx entered my floor, I need to control those by the way. Well I definitely do not want to experience whether I will die by being taken out of my dungeon.

Great another question, I don’t have the answer to. Whatever, I will just try to not get separated, easy peasy. Now coming back to my ability of environmental manipulation. I must be controlling my own body or something along the line. Why is everything so complicated? Sigh.

Water! start flowing from here!!! I shouted with my best commanding voice and waited. One minute.. Two minutes…five minutes. Nothing happened. My creatures looked towards my direction as if I was crazy. Feeling embarrassed at my failure, I decided not to do that ever again, clearly it was not working. I should be able to control it, and clearly this is not through shouted out commands. The ability table can not be wrong, right? I tried to think deeply and see what my instincts were telling me as they never led me astray till now. After calming down for a while, I felt that I knew what I needed to do.

I started concentrating on a point a few metres up on the right rocky hill facing towards the cavern walls. I began picturing to myself that there was continuous gushing springwater from this point. I focused my will so hard at this particular point with what I wanted, that mana started flowing towards that particular point after a minute or so. After sucking up around a hundred points of mana from my mana pool, a fountain of water started pouring out from there and forming a small, few metre tall waterfall. I decided to make a pond under the falls to collect the water. Connecting the few dozen metres between the hill and the cavern wall, I carved out the area to make a somewhat circular pond around one metre deep and added stepping stones for my creature to cross over. Furthermore I made a brook, spilling down from the pond, cutting horizontally through the centre of the cavern, while curving around the Pine thicket hill in the middle.

After making a small cave at the opposite wall for my brook to flow into. I tried to replicate my success from earlier, I again concentrated my focus into the cave and willed my flowing water to stop there and disappear. After another deduction of mana, the water seemed to disappear once it reached the cave. This does not make any sense. I wonder how this ability works. I contemplated. Since I knew that I was not getting any answers in the near future, I decided to use my newfound ability to make light sources in a few corners of my ceiling, just to make my cave walls sparkle prettier.

I started to grow all types of coniferous trees all over my cavern, still trying to mimic the outside world. At the same time feeling that my other room was a bit too small in comparison to my cavern, I increased the radius of the circular room by another five metres and increased its height. It ended up being a round chamber of diameter of twenty metres and height of around fifty. I grew trees around the wall of the chamber and left the centre of the room as circular clearing of around half a dozen metre radius covered in grass, wildflowers and purple sleepers. After growing numerous blood sucking vines along the walls of the corridor between the rooms and on the cliffs as well as on strategic locations around the cavern, I finally felt that this time around my floor would no longer be held in contempt. Now I just have to populate my floor with more creatures.