I had been entrusted by the master with a grave mission. I had entered the dungeon of black fire through the mouth of the Ouroboros's dragon. Lucifer's dungeons had been eliminated for now, until like Leviathan he had them moved in to trap and corner his brother's dungeon like the savage little animal that it was. But he would not get the chance. The fire ate the light, ate anything that would burn, but the fires weren't hot enough to burn me, dry my clay and bake it solid yes, but it would not stop me. Instead I walked forward, allowed the earth beneath my feet to guide me, to warn me of the other monsters that were living here. Slimes? Slugs? No, living masses of lava, slow as molasses uphill but normally they have two benefits, their victims can't see where they are going, and they can simple pass through the solid stone of the labyrinth.

Child's play for the likes of Archie, he didn't need eyes to see through the darkness when he could track the shape and vibrations of stone, and he didn't need to concern himself with mazes when he could reshape solid stone at will.

"Were I the servant of a lesser dungeon..." Thus mere minutes into the enemy fortress I claimed my prize, a sphere of mana, a Dungeon core though I did not know its colour. "...you would be crushed and broken into pieces, presented to my master to use as nourishment for himself or payment for his allies. Sadly it is not meant to be."

The ball gritted it's proverbial teeth though it's discomfort was obvious, it's master had presented it with excellent pain medication through his mind numbing rage.

My earth sense led me to where the core had the path leading back into the rest of its dungeon and I tossed it through as I turned around to leave. Sadly I underestimated the core's capacity for spite as I suddenly felt the entire floor collapse on me.

----------------------------------------

I watched as Archie's respawn timer started up, indicating his fate.

[Dungeon Keeper: Archie just got killed, is the other dungeon okay?]

[Ouroboros: It collapsed, it looks like he succeeded in escorting the core out of the realm]

I crossed Dark Fire's name off of the chalkboard. That leaves me with six dungeons I needed to help and 48 cores that have yet to begin their reverse breaches and re-enter the mortal world. Right then, time to begin a speed run. We think one of the Patrons of the dungeons we're invading is the god who blessed Merlin, so we're hoping to open a line of a dialogue with that one, one of the cores has Pluto one of the gods who blessed my floor as it's patron, a third has Asmodeus who's the patron of a friend of mine, and a fourth might be in raid distance of another friend of mine but Graves will have to finish scouting it in order to make sure. Currently the plan is to try diplomacy, with a side of scouting, if that fails though then the 48 of you are going to be divided into six groups of eight and are going to go on a rampage until all the enemy cores are once more inside of the mortal plain.

If the looks the monsters shot reflected their cores opinions they seemed to like this idea.

We're in agreement then, Graves will scout out the enemy forces and I'll get into contact with my allies. Dismiss.

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I looked at the growing city, they finished work on the canals that would manage flooding in the area and facilitate travel for the Lemurian's, that would make it so that they can access the city proper, a flicker of flame hovering between my finger and thumb, a common tactic for practising fire magic in the Pentaghast family. As for getting land dwellers into their area? Well that'll be harder. The bags made using the Atmosphere Jellyfish the Keeper manufactured for us could provide air for them, but other than that that's the limit of what we can do with them. We were going to have a meeting with the Mustang company soon, led by a family of Centaurs, it would be good if we had the product that we were working on ready by that point. The mages tower should be the ones working on it right at the moment, but they were facing some difficulties.

In terms of elemental affinities, the Keep was all over the place: The first floor had undead, the second floor had a tree, the third floor was oceans, the fourth was all about machinery. It's like Keeper's getting the option to make a completely new dungeon with each new floor that he grows, currently the necromancers are managing, and will probably continue to manage up until the Keep grows a fifth floor, then they'll have to decipher it all over again. Most Dungeons keep to what every theme they were born with from their first material until their twentieth floor, even then they only change to a new theme when they're introduced to other dungeons through the chat and get the idea to apt on one-another's ideas.

Just another way that the Keeper was different from a normal dungeon, and one of many reasons why this project had seen so many delays. Charles arrived at the warehouse where the monsters that Grimm had been tasked with producing were being kept. Bone Dragons, as the Mages had classified them, not to be confused with a skeleton Dragon, which are the reanimated remains of a dead dragon, a Bone Dragon is a necromantic construct made using bones as a material, or in this case lime stone. Grimm and the people he recruited to help him was taking several chunks of limestone and methodically carving them into Dragon Bone shapes and assembling them into artificial skeletons with hearts made out of iron and emeralds. The Soul creation was the hardest part of the process.

A dungeon can create a soul as easily as they breathe, but such things are unstable and easy to break down outside of the support of their domains, which is why the monsters they create cannot leave the dungeon proper, not unless they get a hell of a blessing. The easiest way is to simply steal a soul from something else, if you do that though then you must take measures to grow and adjust the soul in question to fit the new vessel, taking the soul of a fly and stuffing it into a dragon would naturally take a while for instance. The stone from the Keeper's dungeon, already full of mana, was especially suited to this task though that ran into a different set of issues. Materials taken from dungeons are subject to decay, it hasn't been much of a problem here, since the Keeper has been producing so much mana, and because they've had access to people with strong Earth affinity since almost the beginning.

It's the biggest reason why so much of the world is uninhabited, the difficulty of acquiring resources. As it stands, after months of work they've managed to successfully produce one of the creatures that they needed, a Bone Dragon. The creature met several of the requirements that they needed for a monster, the ability to fly at enormous speeds with it's bones carved with specialised runes to move the air around them, in the front air is pushed away to create a smooth frictionless vacuum, in the back air is constantly pushing forward to accelerate the Dragon's speed to monstrous levels. For transportation, the Dragon's huge size and empty ribcage made it possible for him to carry massive loads, thus making the bony monsters highly suitable for transporting goods, is what they'll tell the centaurs when they get here.

Centaur's are horse type Demi-humans, which means that few means of transport are capable of bringing them here, even if they were wealthy enough to employ one of those methods, which they are, they were originally horses, it was a point of pride that they would go everywhere by hoof. The matter with the bone dragon finished Charles looked at the horizon watching a huge dust cloud that was approaching them from afar, so the Centaurs are charging at them at full speed then, they'll definitely need a room to rest in then, but that is our job to deal with, the important part is that the person who started this chaos is there to talk about it.

"Where's the Keeper's body?" Apas's boss room looked more like a nursery than anything else with Maat, Keket and Cleo running around. Not exactly appropriate for a goddess of death but originally this floor belonged to Echidna.

"He blew himself up after he ate another blessing." Apas stated bluntly. Of course he did.

"I'm not even going to bother to ask what it was this time." If he asks then he's obligated to report it, and considering which realm that the Keeper managed to breach into it would be extremely bad for people to learn that he picked up a contamination from one of the hellish realms.

"How wise. But no, I'm not attending the meeting." Apas stated making her opinion known. "You lost trust when you let a dungeon demolisher through the front door to kill my mate. I'm not leaving my cubs alone with your people still retaining free reign of the dungeon." With Rest the Keeper was a lot more willing to put people down now, only in this case rather than permanently kill the fools in question he instead kicked them out of the dungeon, and made sure that the entrances were being watched by animated skulls who knew their faces, as he already did with both Jack and all his people. Each skull was given access to gate controls for all of the entrances and between each floor, the gates can't be permanently locked but each skull spits a riddle that must be answered correctly, buying time for monsters to come in and remove the interlopers. Or they can just smash the gates apart anyway. This whole thing was done in response to people who tear dungeons down for a living after all. They would come up with countermeasures for that later. "We'll send Leonaidas instead."

The Ring Artefact spirit was weird, he was already close to gaining his own soul before meeting Keeper, his poltergeist pushed him over the edge and now the ring exists in a inbetween state. He already left the dungeon once when he sneaked into Lithilas and robbed him blind of information on magic casting, so he'd be good for the meeting.

"Understood. Let me know about Keeper's condition." With that the City Lord left to tend to the incoming guests.

----------------------------------------

I wasn't so sure about this, in comparison to some of the bird monsters I've had to deal with over the years these creatures weren't that scary, the only notable thing about them was their aggression, they even picked a fight with one of my gargoyles on the ship. But my patrons swore by them, the only real thing that I had to say about them though was that they'd make for a decent start if I can transfer their hyper aggression into a body that matches said aggression. For now I have contracted the leader of the flock and he was keeping the rest of the flock in line. Every couple of days the birds would lay eggs into a hole on a ship I had dedicated to Aphrodite. The entire blessing of the ship had been remade from the ground up, and thus I swapped out the Blessing that she had gotten for me, a Maride who had been equipped with the ability to impregnate monsters with the water element.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

[F Rank Water Goose Egg-A Goose Egg impregnated by a Maride, what did you expect?]

Oi. Are you guys sure that this is a good idea?

[Absolutely, now we interlink the water inside of the eggs with the water around them and start feeding them monsters of a higher rank] Monsters of a higher rank. Well these eggs are going to be F rank so that's... literally everything else. Whatever I don't exactly have a lot of uses for this one anyway.

[E-Rank Schema Hob Goblin-More intelligent variant of goblin suitable to the position of a field commander or a magic caster]

Aphrodite's entire ship was one of my flooded submersibles, so any land lubber I made here drowned in a few moments. I had ten female geese laying an unfertilised egg per day into the water, after ten days I had a hundred eggs in the water, so I had to drop hundreds of Goblins into the water at a time as I watched the progress bar slowly fill.

[2/10000]

[Attention: Your monster has killed a monster of a higher rank than itself, so it's unlocked the Giant Slayer achievement, but you don't earn anything from your monsters killing each other]

Intriguing. Doubles the XP gains from killing monsters, and it goes up with every five monsters that they kill?

[20/10000] [60/10000] [140/10000] [300/10000] [620/10000] [1260/10000] [2540/10000] [5080/10000] [10160/10000]

The Eggs started to glow with mana cocoons, so they were getting ready to hatch were they? And I had two options for them.

[Select the monster option for now instead of the Demi-human, I'll have you produce a tribe of demi-humans with the second generation once that pain in our hind quarters Keeper is dealt with]

Ours? Tch. Whatever, short term gains are more important right now.

[Evolution Selected: C Rank Cygnus-A Giant Swan used as a personal mount by the Goddess of Beauty and the sea Aphrodite, these ones are being affected by several blessings of water based gods that are affecting their growth]

Of course I got the one from the goddess of beauty. Was it too much to ask for a monster blessed by the god of war? Huu... I'll need to use genie binding magic to bind them instead of having them take up my precious contract slots.

[My turn next, we're going to get sea horses now]

Sea Horses! I manifested my avatar just so that I could beat my face against a wall.

----------------------------------------

"And that would appear to be the sum of their conversation." My first floor boss explained a bag of trail mix next to him.

People often believe that my first floor is merely a way to facilitate communication between the gods, in truth I have several floors I have dedicated specifically to the use of espionage with other secondary purposes on the surface so that no one finds out. Secrets falls under forbidden knowledge, Lies are used to cover for them, and spying also often involves thievery, Compared to ****, Loki and Hermes Ratatoskr is probably the least direct with his espionage abilities as he merely listens in on conversations between dungeons. Keep me informed of what he's doing.

"Can do!" The Squirrel was already loudly chewing on his trail mix before he dragged it off to one of his hiding places.

So it's not enough for Leviathan to take control over the sea but he's also aiming for the sky as well, this is a potentially terrifying development. Those who make use of Genies in selective breeding often take advantage of the quirks of their biology, namely that it's extremely difficult to inbreed them. A Genasi can have anywhere between one quarter to three as the elements of their respective Schema, while in a biological organism inbreeding produces a negative effect for beings made out of elemental energy it has no effect. If Leviathan manages to establish a breeding colony of monster birds under his control then his reach will be dramatically extended. Sea horses? Are they going to get land dwellers next too? I swear if it's not bloody Conquerete it's this pirate bastard. Keeper came up with some decent anti-air designs in memory serves, he should consider shoring them up. Ah Speaking of which.

[Dungeon Keeper: Old man, you there? I need a favour]

He's a good kid, little too naive for his own good sometimes, for now here's hoping he has some more anti-air in place.

[Lithilas: I have some problems of my own I need to work on, perhaps we can do an exchange?]

[Dungeon Keeper: Sure]

[Dungeon Keeper: Hel thinks the Mimic Mystery Mansion is one of her father's dungeons, is it possible for you to send someone over to check?]

[Dungeon Keeper: We have someone on the way over to see if it's him that's in this frozen hellscape, so what I'd really like is if you could get his core back out of Cocytus]

If it is it would have to be a floor that's buried so deep none of the people who have been sent over have been able to find it. Which either means using simple brute force or good old fashion diplomacy.

Course I could just directly ask Loki, especially assuming that he feels inclined to take his Daughter's side in her divorce, he is technically Lucifer's ally. Of course that's all the more reason for him to want to help us.

[Lithilas: I have some intel on what Leviathan is doing right now]

[Dungeon Keeper: How'd you get that?]

[Lithilas: Dedicate a floor to intel gathering when you get the chance]

[Dungeon Keeper: Yet another thing that I need to add to my list]

[Lithilas: Put it at the bottom, the Utility of Instancing is too important, not to mention getting into the good books of any gods that you want to nab the good graces of]

[Dungeon Keeper: Yah mentioned having something you wanted to share about Leviathan?]

[Lithilas: Leviathan is on the cusp of gaining a very strong air force, one that if you aren't prepared to deal with is going to simply ignore you and go straight into the mainland]

[Dungeon Keeper: How bad could they be?]

[Lithilas: The birds are Cygnus, the pets to one of the gods backing Leviathan, with blessings from multiple sea gods, chances are good not even Leviathan can figure out what hell he's about to unleash on us]

[Lithilas: I saw your offer, if you have a B-Rank that can manipulate water prepared I'll try and mass produce it, at the very least I might be able to play containment against whatever he's about to do]

[Dungeon Keeper: Give me a second]

I needed to come up with countermeasures for Leviathan's monsters, it'll be easier once I know what those creatures can do though. Then I got another message from the Keeper and I could feel his wariness bleeding through.

[Dungeon Keeper: There's Levi but that's more to do with Oceanus's blessing]

Which I don't have.

[Dungeon Keeper: I got a guy over here whose been working my lab basically non-stop to combine and separate Schema's]

[Lithilas: And you've gotten the schema's of the dungeons you met while in Helheim too, let me see the list]

A mere genie isn't enough on it's own to be able to block Leviathan's antics. What I need is a debuff specialist that can knock the birds out of the air, preferably without being trapped in the dungeon proper.

[Lithilas: I'll take the Totem poles]

[Dungeon Keeper: Done]

[Dungeon Keeper has Given Lithilas the Totem Pole Schema]

[Lithilas: You have a lot of monster schema's, are you gonna be okay?]

[Dungeon Keeper: Is that gonna be a problem?]

[Lithilas: You do realise that you get a free monster every time you level up right?]

[Dungeon Keeper: That all? I have to go work now see yah]

[Dungeon Keeper Has left the chat]

Well... he'll figure it out eventually.

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I was doing surprisingly well, the Sand dune dungeon that was using that Manticore to level has been brought under my control. Resources have been pretty tight for me, ever since I retooled my dungeon as a brothel instead of a normal dungeon, so getting the resources to actually build up my tower was a lot harder than what it would normally be. Which is fine, all things considered, Keeper and Graves aren't the only ones that can use cheats to Level up. The Succubi Asmodeus planted in my dungeon were accumulating power from lust, several of them already had enough stored that I could pop a few floors if I wanted to and had the room to expand.

'Room to Expand' was precisely the issue though.

Unlike Normal dungeons that formed underground I was born inside of a building, a palace to be precise. I knew from the beginning that I was destined to reach for the sky! My beauty a shining beacon to all that is within this drab and dreary-

"Mistress." I was brought out of my fantasy by the Succubi that acted as an intermediary between myself and Asmodeus.

"We must make a decision about the next floor." Hmph! I already got all the goddesses of beauty, Your Master Asmodeus, Fortuna and Pluto are only here due to the loosest relationship to the subject. What more could I possibly ask for?

"More resource floors? Yah know so that we can build?"

I go through the trouble of evolving all of the schema's that I have accumulated into the objects of beauty that I have now and you believe that I desire a mine? Pump the Sand Dune for building materials.

"Asmodeus help me... What about other resources then, like food?"

Oh yes, because a farm is precisely what I always wanted. If require resources I will make that wretched Sand Dune that was profiting off of me manufacture them. Do try to come up with a useful suggestion if you insist on piping them anyway.

"For the love of... what about wine?"

Wine?

"It loosens up peoples inhibitions, our efficiency for piping out desire from the city will go way up!" My Succubus explained her tail wagging behind her.

Who do we aim at for wine though?

"Bacchus!"

And what do we need to get him involved?

"A winery preferably, a good one at the very least."

We don't know much about chemistry I am afraid, we'll have to import a lot of material if we want to make anything of use. And are there even any specific monsters that would be useful for this?

"If memory serves you've mentioned that a potential agriculture theme has popped up a couple of times already, we should start with that the next time that you Level up, then set it to produce fruit so that we can process it into fine wines and other alcohols."

That is true, aside from Beauty a lot of the gods I deal with deal in agriculture as a by product. Hmm. You aren't trying to trick me into making a farm are you?

"Wh-What of course not!?" The Succubus cleared her throat with a polite Ahem. "If the Monster pull doesn't give us something useful we'll need to look into either acquiring or breeding a specific monster to act as inhabitants or a boss of the floor." The Succubus looked like she was trying to change the subject.

Hang on I'm getting a call from somewhere.

[Dungeon Keeper: Hey Jewel I got a question for you, how well do you know your main sponsor Asmodeus?]

[Jewel: Unless you have a monster schema that specialises in producing fine quality wine then I have my own issues I need to deal with]

[Dungeon Keeper: Is that all?]

As I wondered about what he meant a new notification came up.

[Dungeon Keeper has offered the E Rank Schema Alcohol slime price: Bejeweled Concubine's mirror's aid]

[Jewel: Are you serious? I asked for fine wine and you gave me cheap medicinal alcohol!?]

I let my bubbling rage fitter through the connection before another more acceptable offer came through for me.

[Dungeon Keeper has offered the E Rank Schema Burbon Slime price: Bejeweled Concubine's mirror's aid]

Burbon?

"It is a very fine alcoholic beverage." The Succubus supplanted.

[E-Rank Burbon Slime: An alcohol slime that has fed off of a excessive amount of fermented fruits until it learned how to duplicate their properties]

[Jewel: It'll do]

[Jewel: I have Asmodeus's emissary that you met last time, I trust that will suffice?]

The individual in question sent a look of surprise and annoyance.

[Dungeon Keeper: Deal!]