It was time to do some work around here. First, using Mana Integration, I decided to check on the area of wall I had felt was thinner. Usually I can go about a foot deep, but as I began to take control of the wall I could feel it was only 10 inches thick. Now I had hoped I could keep pushing with my Mana to flood the empty air I could feel, but instead I found my skill wouldn’t push beyond the wall. I could “feel” that it was empty space, but it seemed that due to it being a new area I couldn’t just flood it with my Mana and take control from the safety of my own walls.

I had been hoping I could flood it so that I could scout out what may be there, but it would seem the System didn’t want me to. At first I felt it was unfair, that the System would block me so that I had to force a possible confrontation, but thinking on it a little made some sense. If I had been able to just flood my Mana anywhere I wanted, what was going to stop me from just taking control of huge swathes of land as an excuse to scout? I knew I wasn’t the only dungeon or the first by a long shot. If dungeons had free reign to spread their Mana without any borders, the whole planet would probably be engulfed by now.

When I spread my Mana, I was basically using a miniscule amount of it to “claim” territory. Plus if the other dungeons were like me in having an insanely high regen rate, it wouldn’t even take that long to claim large amounts of land. Hell, in just 18 hours I had claimed a room that was nearly 100 square feet in size and I was just some level 4 dungeon. As I grow in levels and Mana, my ability to claim a room of this size would drop dramatically. So in a sense of keeping things in balance, being unable to just flood my Mana anywhere made sense.

But making sense did not mean I still didn’t feel somewhat cheated. Because of this rule I basically had no choice but to open up a hole in the wall, where possible threats could come in, leaving myself vulnerable. Seeing how I still hadn’t been able to build up a proper dungeon monster army, I decided to hold off for now. Instead I would work on the room to the south of my first chamber, where I had planned to have the water originate if I could get a water node source.

Normally it would take about the same amount of time as the room I had just finished, but I wanted to build up my creatures at the same time. So using my Mana Pools limited 30 energy, minus the small amount of Mana for the ecosystem skill, I began to dig it out. Using my Mana I began with bats, creating one for 20 Mana, and then waiting a few minutes to refill. Every 15 minutes or so I would let my Mana and Mana Pool fully regenerate and repeat, until I had about created 13 more bats. Overall it only took a little over an hour to do so. Imagine if I had been doing this from the start instead of lazing around, I would have had nothing to fear from the skink. Though with this many bats, I don’t know if my little centipede would have had a chance to fight and evolve.

I watched my little swarm of bats gather, as the first and second bat I had took control. Both of them were a tad bigger, or at least had more Mana, which made it easy to single them out in the new crowd. But calling to them was going to become a hassle if I couldn’t call them anything else other than first and second bat. I wanted to give them a nickname, but it would seem the System didn’t like that. Stupid rules making things more complicated then needed.

Then I began to focus on making some more centipedes. I only planned on creating a pair for my current centipede, as these creatures were much larger than any of the other creatures I had, except of course my new lesser Kobold. I needed to make some tier 0 creatures for them to hunt, so overloading my current ecosystem was a no go. The bats luckily fed on the little flying insects that were in my cave, meaning it wasn’t too hard to keep them sustained. But a 2 foot centipede needed a lot more than an 8 inch bat to be well fed.

I checked my current centipede, to find yet another of my original creatures was a female. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but it would seem a lot of my first creations were more female than male. Whatever the reasoning for that I used my Mana to create a male Guardian and found a shocking revelation as a result. My female Guardian was 2 feet in length, where my male was only a little over a foot. It would seem the female centipede is much larger than the male, though I wasn’t expecting it to be nearly double the size. Either way, it just meant my male would be easier to take care of in terms of food.

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As I thought that I could feel a sense of disapproval from my female Guardian. I couldn’t pinpoint why I was receiving this disapproval, but it wasn’t the first time a guy had done something wrong and didn’t know how or why. Unfortunately I had no way to ask and just sent apologetic feelings over, as it was all I could do for now.

So now I had a swarm of bats, a pair of Guardian centipedes, and 1 Lesser Kobold. I looked over at my Kobold, as she slept on a larger patch of ferns. She had eaten some of the larger beetles, but I could tell it wasn’t her favorite. She had also tried the ferns and moss, which again neither seemed to be quite right for her. I wanted to have about 6 Kobolds, and maybe another pair of Guardian centipedes, so I decided to pull up my Formless Template skill.

I wasn’t sure what to make, though I had a few ideas. I wanted to stay away from anymore carnivorous creatures, as I had enough of them. I had a ton of ferns and a good amount of moss, so something to feed off them would be great. But they also couldn’t just be food for other creatures. Unless I made them to be drones, leaving intelligence completely off the table, I had no desire to create a creature purely as a food source. They were going to be living creatures, trying to survive just like anything else.

Ultimately this was the down-side of having creatures that needed food and not just Mana to survive. Even my bats could eventually end up on the food cycle, falling to the centipedes and kobolds. The problem was that when you look at a real cave ecosystem, you’ll see its more like a pyramid. Floods and droppings like guano feed bacteria and fungus. Small insects and fish eat this, and larger insects eat them. Finally bats tend to be at the top, being the biggest predator, with the occasional centipede that grew large enough. But my ecosystem was to top heavy, with too many large predators and not enough foundation.

I wanted an herbivorous creature but couldn’t think of anything that lived in caves. Until I remembered an insect that may just survive in this slightly humid cave. Looking at my template, I watched as it changed, leaving me looking at the outline of a snail. The form I had was only an inch big, so I used Mana to enlarge it to nearly 6 inches long, with its shell standing at 8 inches high. This wasn’t planned on being anything special for now, but decided a tier 1 mana core wouldn’t be much. Overall it only cost 4 Mana for the entire thing, 1 for the form, 2 to enlarge it, and another for the core. Setting it to finalize I felt it come to life.

Giant Cave Snail

This creatures is just a slightly evolved form of a cave snail. The newly formed Mana core allows it to harden its shell slightly, but overall it has no other abilities. Feeding off of moss, plants, debris, and guano this snail is the base for creature for a larger cave ecosystem.

Weak – Base

Chances to Evolve – Very Low

Looking at it showed it was literally just an enlarged snail. The added Mana should help my creatures grow just a little more when they ate it, and the shell defense meant it wasn’t just a quick meal. It would also help to keep my cave from piling up in guano and other droppings from my creatures.

Since they were still tier 1 they joined in on the ecosystem skill, meaning that even though I had created it with my Formless Template skill, it was able to use my Mana Pool to create them. This made it so much easier, as I had feared I would have to keep track of them as they were hunted.

With that I began focusing on making my 6 Lesser Kobolds and finishing up my room digging.