That spider would not be the last, even as I fed mana into the various creatures in my little cave I thought about my new existence. I was the pitcher plant and more would come, I could not afford to be weak, I suspected that my core would be a eagerly sought prize and if not that then the mana and anima that served as my lifeblood would be. I fed on those that I lured to their doom, and when this was animals this did not bother me but the thought of killing people sickened me. If I was going to survive without compromising my morals, I would need to find another way to grow. I had noticed something that had given me some hope though, when I had fed mana into my centipede I had felt its anima and noticed that it was larger than it was when I created it. Some of this was from its meals but at least a part of it was due to the mana that it had been absorbing and converting into food for itself. If creatures in my dungeon could breed and grow without costing anima from me then they would eventually serve as a source of that precious resource.

The progress on that front was encouraging, while the spider and centipede had both eaten a number of the beetles I had around the rest of the beetles and grasshoppers had survived and were growing incredibly quickly. It made sense considering they were eating a lot and having a constant trickle of energy and nutrients pumped into them at a cellular level. I had underestimated just how fast they would be growing though as already a few of the beetles had mated and laid eggs which were developing quickly and would hopefully hatch soon.

My ability to effect such dramatic change in the lifecycle of my creatures lead me to wonder how else I might be able to interact with them. I started to create another centipede but this time halted the process before the mana could begin to construct the body instead holding the image in my mind. After a few moments it stabilized and I was able to visualize the creature in question, a centipede about 4 cm long. Slowly so as not to break the image or my concentration I began to poke at it, gently prodding the image with my mind, thickening the carapace, enlarging the legs and spacing them out a bit more, enhancing the jaws so that it would be stronger and thicker. The image was a far more fearsome sight to be sure, jaws easily able to crunch anything in the dungeon.

I released the energy and watched as the creature was grown into existence from nothing. The anima, slightly more than originally as befitting the larger form, settled into the creature. Immediately I sensed that something was wrong. Firstly the movement that should have been fast and smooth was jerky and stiff the joints unable to function as they should with the changes to the carapace. The new creatures jaws were indeed much stronger but they also couldn’t close all the way and the front claws were permanently raised and useless for gabbing and crawling.

I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised that designing a living creature is difficult, but I had just assumed that it would be as easy as all the other dungeon abilities had been. Looking at the pitiful creature I had made I started going over how it could be improved, reshaping the joints would be tricky but not impossible, but restructuring the head and jaw to allow the larger size to work would be much worse.

Keeping my first experiment in mind I pulled the needed energies from my core and began reshaping the image to fix the problems in the first design, a thinning of the shell around joints and expanding said joints slightly reached a good middle ground in durability and strength. Shifting the jaws down so the new bulges of muscle were lower and could be fully developed gave the thing what looked like a weird buggy underbite but let the jaws function correctly, finally I toughened the very tips of the two front claws and shifted them fully into combat duty.

The mana swept outwards and constructed my newest creation, the anima soon following to bring life to the hopefully functional creature. The second creature looked off to my eyes, it lacked the menace of the first one or the natural elegance of natural selection, but I hoped it would be effective. Unlike its predecessor this creature moved with all the speed of the original model but with greater attack and defense options, and while likely not an optimal design for a wild creature I hoped this would serve both it and me well in the violent world of my dungeon.

The process for creating both of these creatures had taken a bit over an hour and even in that time the first centipede had not managed to move out of the small chamber I had made them in. This just served as a chance to see the new creature in action as I had no doubt the voracious killer would descend on its weaker fellow.

Sure enough after moving around for a short while the new centipede detects the arthritic progress of the botched one and after feeling it with its antenna it pounces and rips into the other. The tough shell slows it down impressively even with the improved jaws and the other centipede even gets a bite of its own in on its attacker. But the equally tough shell of its opponent and its own flawed jaws stop it from doing any real damage and after a brief scuffle it is torn apart by my newest creation. The anima of the creature flows back into me and a drop of it into its killer, I am still not sure exactly what the anima the winners of these contests are getting will do but I imagine it will be beneficial.

The newest addition to the dungeon begins to consume its victim and I leave it to its work as I survey my creation. The dungeon now consist of the core chamber and a tunnel that curves up and shoots strait for the surface, four feet below where it breaks out into another cave it suddenly widens into a pancake shaped cavern 6 feet wide surrounding the shaft. There are a number of smaller chambers shooting off the main one here and a few divots in the floor are full of algae and water. The wettest sections of the space are covered in a mossy carpet that is spreading rapidly but much of the space is also covered in a number of lichen species. Among all the growth there is of course a scattering of fungus, molds and even mushrooms are starting to appear and give a diversity to the space.

Through this tiny jungle roam a small population of beetles and grasshoppers, it is this that I want to expand upon, there needs to be a stable population of food both to attract predators so that I can add them to my collection and to feed the predator populations.

It felt like it had been an enormous amount of time but I somehow knew that it had been less than a day since I had arrived here. The work I had accomplished filled me with a sense of accomplishment but I needed to fill out the life in this terrarium of mine, a number of small species had fallen into me over the last few hours as the trickle of water continued, I imagined that there was a storm going on overhear and that I was benefiting from that. I began scattering a population of mites and other tiny creatures thorough the mosses and fungi and followed them with pill bugs, and a number of new species that I hoped would form the base of the ecosystem. Finally I made a few very small centipedes that would grow into the ecosystem when it could support them.

I really wanted to get a spider or something but other than the tarantula there had been no arachnids so far. The only thing that I did have that I hadn’t made yet were a few ferns and a woody plants that would grow too slowly without light.

Light was something that I wanted to figure out, eventually I wanted to be able take advantage of photosynthesis and vision in more complex organisms, so far darkness was acceptable but if people were going to be the threat to me that I feared they would be then they would be able to bring their own light to the party and my creatures would be at a disadvantage if they were not able to use sight as well.

I desperately wanted to know just how the [system] interacted with people, it seemed like I could expect there to be some weird shit in this world and the fact that I was able to make almost arbitrary changes to the form of a living creature implied that there would be other sources of such alteration. The boon that I had received was also something that I could probably expect to have a hand in how this world worked. As much as I did not want to jump to conclusions it seemed like this world had some mechanics more suited to a tabletop game.

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For now though my path was simple, grow and stay under the radar and figure out exactly what my abilities were.

I began to shift through the elements that I was able to create and was pleasantly surprised to find that the upper half of the elemental table was already filled in nicely, either the trace minerals in the rock had provided enough to duplicate or I had always known these as a part of my dungeon nature. I began to make mixes of elements that I remembered as being components of LEDs and using mana to run electrical currents through them. Making electrical currents had turned out to be very easy but getting them to make light was anything but, the only thing That kept me going was that I knew it was possible and that if I could get it working then I would be able to speed the growth of my dungeon significantly.

I was fully captivated in my work and focused on a small sample of lightly glowing mettle imbedded on the ceiling of my core chamber.

A sudden burst of energy at the entrance, ten, no a hundred times bigger than the tarantula. “what the hell?” I instantly directed my attention to the entrance of my tiny dungeon and found that a large form was draped over the entrance. An arm was reaching down into the passage and for a moment I thought that whoever it was had intentions on my core. When seconds passed and nothing happened, I began to process what my senses were telling me.

I could feel a heartbeat and lifeforce in the form that I was realizing was actually quite small, a child at least. Beyond that I could tell very little, that same lifeforce was disrupting my ability to see in that area, like it was a kind of interference in the already murky outer reaches of my control. My new ability to determine distance and size was helping here and I was certain that I sensed something here that was entirely absent from the creatures that I had consumed before. Some new type of essence like anima but more ephemeral and sweet, I had an uncomfortable craving for that stuff that was making me want to forget that there was a person attached to this meal.

And the person had been still for about a minute now and was concerning me, I had been afraid that I was going to be found and killed as a threat or used as a crafting material. I had not been mentally prepared for there to be a kid literally falling into me.

What the hell do I do?

There was nothing I could do immediately the anima that was inside this child was about a quarter of what I had in total so far. Just trying to stir a bit of mana in his direction was impossible.

It took about ten more minutes before I noticed the mana near the arm start to twist and push against the anima in the child.

No no no no!

Visions of the other things that had fallen into my reach flashed before me and I was confronted with the mental image of the arm that was currently inside my tunnel dissolving.

There was a part of me that started to make justifications that it wasn’t my fault and that it was nothing to feel guilty over, I politely told that part of me precisely where it could put that and started to try and pull my mana back from where it was pushing and swirling up against the kid.

Unfortunately much like when I had tried to send a thread up near him it proved impossible to control anything near him, I imagined this was some sort of cosmic joke that the limitations of a dungeon that normally kept people safe from them was in this case dooming someone. It was also possible that the ambient mana that was trying to consume the kid was totally out of my conscious control just like my old immune system.

There was a wavering in the anima of the kid! He had been still all this time and now it looked like the life that had been hanging on was leaving. I could feel as the anima started to leave his body, but as it weakened I had an idea. The thing interfering with my control was the anima, if that was true then there should be a moment when I could interact with the kid before he died and maybe, just maybe save him.

I watched in agony as the image of the kid, a young boy, became clearer as the lifeforce in him quickly faded, I would only have a small window to do something that I had never done before and had no real idea how to go about doing.

The last of the anima drained away and I gathered a large chunk of anima and mana and prepared as best as I could.

The moment came and I struck. The anima had guttered out to a tiny spark and the ambient mana started to seep through the boys skin to overwhelm and dissolve him. I surged up from my core on a wave of power and slammed into the kid, simultaneously expanding into the cavern around him and diving into him. I sent a ball of anima strait at the last remnant of his own programed with my will to aid him in the best ways I know how. To protect him from external mana and to allow him to absorb it and use it himself converting it like my creatures do, healing and energizing him.

The mana I spread throughout his body and searched for whatever was killing him. I found far too many things. Other than the massive number of scrapes and bruises there was dehydration, extreme fatigue, a host of fractured bones, internal bleeding and a nasty gash on his ribs that looked like it had been put there by a blade of some sort. Whatever had happened to the kid it was not just a mater of him falling down here, I was shocked that he was even alive.

I got to work with my mana first stopping the bleeding external and in and starting to replace his blood plasma. I didn’t want to risk rejection of blood that I had made but there was no real challenge in adding saline. I pulled up another chunk of anima from my dwindling reserves and spun it into his bones as I worked on repairing them. Working my will again I instructed it to feed mana into his stem cells and provide them with the needed materials to produce new cells when needed.

Next was the gash in his side, I had already stopped the bleeding but there was still a lot of damaged tissue that needed to be stitched together. I split my focus and the threads of mana danced through the wound sealing it up. All the while mana that had been trying to consume him began to get pulled into his core and be used to refill his reserves of energy, slowly replacing the basic nutrients that he had depleted.

It was working, the body was healing and that tiny spark of lifeforce remained, as did the strange essence that I had sensed earlier. When I had first dived in it had just begun to fray slightly around the edges but once I poured my own anima into the child it had stabilized, holding on even at the end. I had my suspicions as to what it was but was too focused now to humor them.

The major wounds had been repaired the bleeding in his torso and skull stopped and the damage to bone and flesh repaired, a large number of bruises and scrapes remained but I wanted to see if the kid would remain stable if I allowed him to sit for a minute.

I withdrew slowly and waited to see what would happen, the whole process had taken only a few minutes and even with my ability to be incredibly gentile I was worried that the body might go into shock. Nothing happened, the arm still hung and breath continued to be pulled into the boy’s lungs. Now though the mana in the air passes into the boy and was drawn to every part of the body replenishing reserves. The anima in the bones however seemed to be creating mana instead of using the ambient stuff which was interesting and unexpected. The result was his bone marrow was getting all the resources it could handle and producing blood cells both white and red to deal with all the remaining problems in his system. I still know so little about how this world works and every moment I spend not knowing something is a moment that I am in danger.

The patter of rain on my patient made me take note of the new space I had claimed. I took a moment to take stock of my unplanned acquisition. It was a vertical shaft that was about 15 feet deep and partially covered at the top an overhang and a bush covered most of the entrance where a steady stream of water fell over the edge. And down the shaft onto the kid. This would not help his hypothermia, so I directed my mana to reshape the lip of the entrance to prevent the stream of water. Consuming the water on his body and instructing the walls to heat themselves to something more livable than a wet rock crevice.

While a dungeon can’t feel physical exhaustion I was mentally drained, I fervently hoped the kid would remain stable and safe because I didn’t know if I had the focus to dive in and start healing again.

[Criteria met: Dungeon core has acquired boon, Lifeweaver. Dungeon can now interact with and modify its creature’s anima]

[Criteria met: Dungeon core has acquired boon, Manasurgeon. Dungeon can now shape and modify creatures physically]

Well those are dumb. I could already do that! I want a refund [system]!

…

Well at least the kid I alive for now.