[Chiton Domain]: arthropods and arthropod monsters are granted the [tough hide] boon automatically.

[Spatial Compression]: the ability to compress your interior to allow for more space while growing. Starting compression factor is 1.5 in the three cardinal directions. Later floors compression will increase with mana density.

[Metabolic Enhancement]: The living rate of dungeon creatures is enhanced, creatures grow and live faster in all regards. This increase comes at the price of mana that is used to fuel the greater energy requirements.

Oh ho ho! Now this is what I’m talking about! Some real juicy stuff here. The three options hung there in my mind, each a tempting and delectable treat of its own, though one clearly standing out.

The [Chiton Domain] was the simplest of the choices and if my understanding of boons was correct it was a big deal. Every single arthropod would get a boon in my dungeon, if I wanted to make big scary spiders to guard my core this would be huge. It would also lock me in on making arthropods which seemed like it might be unwise. There is a very good reason that bugs only get so big, they are very basic lifeforms and unless I wanted to totally rework them they would be fairly poor guardians. What I was worried about was that if I started to change them too much they might not count as arthropods any more. There was also the arthropod monsters to consider though, that was a promising name but there was no guarantee that it would be useful or available to me any time soon. Right now all I had were mental images of giant ferocious bugs and a handful of oversized centipedes.

Next of course was the most interesting, [Spatial Compression], and I was desperate to know more about how that would work. If I understood it correctly it would allow me to make things that were bigger on the inside which was all sorts of awesome in so so many ways. 150% might not sound like a lot but if you carried it out into three dimensions then if my new mental math skills were serving me well I would have 3.375 times the total volume to work with. And it sounded like that would grow as I did! If I could get to 3 times compression it would be a massive 27 times more volume to work with. Cubic growth was insane. The unknown for this one lay in how to trigger this change, the boon said that it would increase on later floors but I had no idea that there had been such a thing and had no clue how to make a new one. The second was that there was no guarantee that the mana I generated would be increased with the greater volume of the space. I hoped it would but there was also the possibility that there would only be the same amount of mana generated in that space as there would have been in the ordinary tunnels. Still the pure cool factor of warping space itself was putting this at the top of my list.

[Metabolic Enhancement] was the obvious choice for an increase in upkeep the growth of life, and therefore anima, would be enhanced in the dungeon, this would let me further speed up my anima production in what sounded like a big way. Never the less this appealed to me less than the others. While more immediately useful and providing a needed bonus this seemed to have less room for growth down the line.

In the end I felt fairly confident that [Spatial Compression] was the way to go and I selected it with only slight anxiety. When it settled in I understood slightly more about how it would work, essentially magnifying the volume of spaces that I claimed on lower floors but it would not kick in until I made another floor. And I still had no idea how to do that.

Well nothing to do but keep on building for now, I had a lot of growth chambers to add around the spiral and I needed to get those going. Once those were built I could start in on adding a small maze with obstacles to limit the ease with which my core chamber could be reached. As much as I liked being visited by the kid I really couldn’t allow such vulnerability to continue. Part of the knowledge that I had absorbed when I received the right to bestow a boon from him was that the same person could not duplicate their attempt and receive another boon. I hoped he would not mind the trade for medical care but I desperately needed a leg up.

I spent the week extending the small chambers along the tunnel, it was boring work but satisfying in its own way. Watching the countless bugs scurry through the tunnels was endlessly fascinating as one species would take over an area and multiply excessively only for their predators to sweep in and cull the herd.

My pledge to experiment with anima constructs began to pay off as well, the few modified creatures almost instantly beginning to dominate the field. Simply adding anima to them in raw form seemed to improve them in every way, making them slightly larger, stronger, stronger and faster than others of their species. This could be seen in the most successful of the hunters even without my intervention, a couple of the spiders and centipedes had grown to the point where they were trapped in the larger sections now. The growth from the minute wisps of anima that they were consuming with each kill making them too big to fit into the smaller connecting tunnels.

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The anima constructs that I built into creatures worked differently, these only affected one aspect of the creature rather than all of them but the changes were much more impressive. I placed a construct into a pill bug designed to let it grip surfaces more easily and toughen its hide significantly, the additions added only ten percent to the total anima that the bug had but made it all but invulnerable to any attack from the other creatures, I suspected that the only threats to the bug were the highly stacked creatures that had begun to hunt in the larger growth chambers.

Then there was the matter of tying the anima constructs into the anima of the creature in question. This was actually more difficult to do though it was more efficient than laying the anima directly on top of the creatures anima. By binding my anima into the native anima the effect would grow with the creature, the intent that I had imbued into the energy would shift and change as the creature did. For example, as the pill bug I made grew I noticed that both its total anima had grown as well as the anima that I had placed into it. The intent that I had put into the anima was that it would harden and toughen the shell of the creature as well as improve the grip of its feet. As it’s anima grew and its physicality followed the anima constructs that I had placed in it grew as well stretching over the larger shell and limbs. I also noticed that there was more growth in creatures that I had improved with anima, though I wasn’t sure if that was just a product of them simply having an easier time surviving and eating or if there was a natural tendency to grow into anima constructs that are placed into a creature, more time will reveal how this will work.

I can’t help waiting for the return of my visitor, the weekly visits go a long way toward cheering me up in between the long bouts of inactivity. I have dozens of meters of tunnel to line and very little to do other than that. Yet on the seventh day there is nothing, the kid doesn’t show up and I try to restrain my disappointment. A few short visits and I was already expecting them to become regular but for all I knew that was the last time I would ever see the little squirt. The realities of being sessile were infuriating the inability to move was painful to contemplate for a creature that had been born to wander.

Still though no use weeping over something unchangeable, I would just have to make good use of my time and hope that next week my visitor would return. The one good thing to the week was that I was finally getting to the point where I could expand myself at a reasonable pace. Every day I lined my main tunnel with chambers meters at a time, the growth giving me something to do as I obsessed over little details in my interior. I had a surplus of mana to work with so anything I could do with mana became my focus. I added detail and tiny mosses to the tunnel turning it from a smooth perfect spiral into a more natural looking passage. It was still too strait and even to be natural but that was something to fix when I had more anima to work with for shifting the tunnel.

I was driven now to add growth chambers to the entire length of my spiral passage and that goal was coming into view quickly. About 5o meters remained before I reached my core chamber and then I would let myself expand a bit and spruce up the place. At the current rate that would take me a bit under ten days.

The time passed in relatively quickly, I was finding more and more to do with just mana, my LEDs were now able to produce white light quite well and could run off tiny amounts of ambient mana, I placed them in the walls recessed in cracks and pockmarks and lit them with low blues to give the tunnel enough light to see with but not to see well. Perhaps not the most strategically sound idea but I had seen nothing larger than a fox so much as peek it’s nose into me and was beginning to wonder just how likely invasion was. If I did feel threatened I could always turn the lights out before my invader got very far and my mana control faded.

Once again the kid didn’t show and I was having a hard time not worrying about him. In the interest of maintaining sanity I tried not to obsess about it and keep my focus on other things. Three more days and I had finished my work on the tunnel and could start on making myself into something more complex. Now that I had the chambers built I was able to make about 10 cubic meters of volume a day something that I was very thankful for. My first order of business was to start adding a few chambers to my main spiral, that I could branch off of in the future. I wanted the spaces to feel more like natural caves so as I shifted the growth chambers out away from the growing bulbs I made sure to leave texture and topography on the walls. The irritating thing about volume is that cubic growth is impressive and to make a 3 by 3 by 3 meter room I would need 27 cubic meters of space only 3 of those would be covered by the tunnel that I had already made. Three days to build a small room is quite a bit and even if it was faster than the growth I had to deal with earlier I probably spent more time than is reasonable placing the various rocks throughout the spaces. After four days I had the first of the rooms finished and began to make a branch horizontal and outward from the spiral to add the first of the alternate paths down, eventually only one of a number of paths would lead downwards. After about 15 meters expanding started to require more anima the farther out I went. At the moment I was 35 meters out from the core and twenty above it, the last meter of expansion had been far more costly than the ones before, I had hit a wall in my growth and I could only hope it was directional and not an absolute volume limit.

I did not get a chance to test this though because I had a visitor, after two weeks the kid is once again climbing down the entrance into my first chamber.