Giant Cave Lamprey (Minion) - Lv. 5
[Concealed] [Blind]
A voracious ambush predator that lurks in subterranean waterways. Eyeless, it senses prey by their vibrations.
Health:
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Azoth:
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XP:
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[Skills]
[Ambusher]
[Chow Down]
[Vibration Sense+]
Okay, not much of an azoth pool on Chompy, but surprisingly durable for something that was only level 5. I was just eyeballing it, but its health bar didn’t look that much shorter than Nar-shesh’s at level 10. From its skills, I had a clear sense of this thing’s intended role. Unlike with Nar-shesh, I was able to open descriptions for each of its skills. Maybe sentient creatures had more privacy rights? Or maybe it was a function of the gap between my and the lamprey’s level? Who knows. [Ambusher] was the same as the goblins’ skill, and [Vibration Sense+] did exactly what it sounded like. [Chow Down] was interesting:
[Chow Down]
This monster’s body has evolved to serve its impatient voracity. Moderate chance upon successful bite attack to make immediate follow-up attack with increased attack speed, increased damage, and moderate chance to inflict [Mangled].
I was no expert, but that seemed certifiably sicknasty. From the sound of it, if my cave lamprey got its teeth in you, it would be like shaking hands with the world’s angriest blender. And speaking of which… I cast a guilty glance over towards where Teekas slept, her bedroll side-by-side with her father’s. I needed to make sure that the goblins were safe from predation by my increasingly powerful and dangerous monsters. But how?
I hadn’t explored the [Dungeon] tab of my status menu, except for its list of my minions. Maybe it held the answer. [Bind Minion] had hinted that it was the key to various permissions and interactions with the dungeon for my minions, so hopefully I could do something about this problem. I tabbed over to the submenu and began exploring. There was a Floors submenu, but it was empty, and I didn't see a "Create Floor" button or anything. Maybe I had to do it on a minion-by-minion basis? I tabbed over to my minion list and found Chompy. Selecting him, I was able to pull up his status menu, but with a couple of additional widgets — most notably, a tab labelled [Behavior]. I selected it, only to be rebuffed by a stinging vibration from the button.
ERROR: ZONE NOT FOUND. CANNOT CUSTOMIZE MINION BEHAVIOR.
Okay, I guess behavior customization was handled on the dungeon-biome level, rather than through individual minions. I backed out to the [Dungeon] menu, and sure enough there was a tab labelled [Zones]. When I opened it and tried to hit the "Create Zone" button, however, I got another error message.
ERROR: FLOOR NOT FOUND. CANNOT CREATE ZONE.
I had no way to create, or designate, a floor, though!! How was I supposed to make any progress like this?
Maybe this was all tied to my mysterious question-mark-filled class quest. What did dungeon floors need? Off the top of my head, I could think of three things: discrete separation from other floors, a boss, and a boss arena. I had a level 10 minion, Nar-shesh, who could serve as a boss. All I was missing was a boss arena, which would de facto serve as a separator between floors.
Did I even want Nar-shesh to be my first-floor boss? Sure, seniority and all, but I hadn’t even worked out a robust design for the first floor: I’d eventually want a boss whose power suite synergized with the environment. Then again, since I didn’t have a firm plan, one boss was as good as another at this point. But what if I couldn’t change floor bosses once I’d chosen them? Ughhhhhhh, so many variables.
It was a moot point right now anyway, since I couldn’t do much landscaping without disturbing the goblins’ hard-earned sleep. Formally establishing my first floor would have to wait. I turned my attention to other matters.
The Fucking Crossbow, as I had begun to mentally refer to it, was safely ensconced in a rock alcove several dozen feet up the main shaft. Closer inspection revealed an array of lines and swooping curves carved into the wood. The array connected the foregrip, where the wielder’s hand would have rested, to the crystal embedded below the stirrup. Experimentally, I fed a tendril of azoth into the carvings. I felt the crossbow catch hold of the stream of magical energy. It drank greedily, but was quickly sated: once the crystal lit up, it drew no further on my azoth reserves, as though a cutoff valve had slammed shut.
So, I’d verified how the device worked. Now to get to why it worked. Was it a function of the crystal, and the engravings were merely a conduit? Or was the crystal simply a suitable rock, and the intricately-carved design where the magic was shaped? I decided to experiment. I smoothed another stretch of cavern wall and began trying to carve into it a copy of the pattern on the crossbow’s foregrip. I gained a newfound appreciation for [Dungeon Domain], my omnifocal awareness sparing me the need to look back and forth between the original and my copy to check my work: I could see them both at once, and focus on them both just as easily. My fine control still wasn’t the best, so the copy I ended up with was somewhat crude. Hopefully, it would still get the job done.
I began to drip azoth into the new array. I could feel it catch, like it had with the original on the crossbow, although nowhere near as forcefully. It felt more like I was having to push my azoth through the diagram. It was leaky, too — visibly so. Sparks of grey-green azoth spilled and spurted from the lines where my drawing had been less than precise. At the end of the diagram, a single line led outwards and abruptly terminated. On the crossbow, the crystal would have sat at the end of it: here, instead, a spitting phosphorous mote flickered to life. It was like the azoth that flowed through the lines of the array was transmuted to pure light as it left them. My light was brighter than the crossbow’s, but much more erratic: even as I watched, it collapsed into a spurt of semiliquid azoth, then reignited, then fizzled out altogether, then splurted again before reigniting.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
It was, in a pleasant change of pace from everything else I’d tried so far, not much of a drain on my azoth pool to fuel the light-array. True, my crude homemade diagram was several times less efficient than the original, but that cost was still just a drop in my dungeon-sized ocean. I decided to continue experimenting: the cost was minimal and the cave I was working in was separated from the goblins by several chambers, so there was no line-of-sight and therefore no risk of the light bothering anyone.
If I wanted to optimize my time, though, I should probably also find something else to do with my azoth so that I wasn’t wasting respiration rate on a full pool. Simple enough: I decided to empower a few more animals. This batch, I decided, was only going to level 5. It seemed like each level was significantly more expensive, XP-wise, than the last, and therefore required more azoth from me. Not levelling this batch of minions as aggressively would let me create more of them, and quantity was a quality I desperately needed at this point. I picked out two more owls, a snake, a squirrel, and just to see what would happen, a pine tree. They were all either level 0 or level 1. I wouldn’t be actively mutating these ones at all: I wanted to see what “normal” progression for animals (and plants) looked like, and get a sense of how often (and how dramatically) [Mutagenic Domain] would trigger.
With a thought, I started pumping azoth into my chosen minions, and returned my attention to the light array. Maybe it was having a crystal to accept the output that made the difference. I grabbed a “fistful” of limestone from the cave wall and squeezed, as hard as I could. After a moment, a clear calcite prism sat at the end, atop where the light would emerge. I fed some more azoth into the diagram.
The crystal lit up from within, and then exploded.
Hm. Alright. Let’s try that again, but use a crystal with fewer imperfections.
Nope, that one exploded too. Maybe the problem was with the diagram? I shaped another crystal, but added a small circle to the end of the output line. Maybe a wider “aperture” would result in lower “pressure” in the exiting azoth? I had no idea, honestly; I was fumbling in the dark.
The crystal exploded again. However, this time, the light from the diagram radiated from the terminal circle, smoothly pulsing in time with the beats of my heart-body. It still flickered, intermittently, but it was much more stable than it had been before.
Achievement Unlocked!
Let There Be Light
Condition: Add a light source to your dungeon.
+10xp
Skill Gained!
[Formations-]
You have taken a faltering, aimless step onto the profound and mysterious path of formations. You may now create basic formations. Moderate penalty to formation quality. Moderate increase to formation azoth cost.
Well, that was a little hurtful, system. I didn’t think my light array was all that bad. I expanded the description of formations; I was pretty sure I knew what they were, but having a handle on the specifics couldn’t hurt.
Formation
A magical effect created by a particular spatial arrangement of symbols, objects, terrain, and even living things. When placed upon weapons, armor, or tools to enhance their utility, referred to as inscriptions.
Okay, no surprises there. I’d definitely need to continue my research into formations: arranging terrain was kind of my whole thing, and if juicing up my goblins’ gear was as simple as carving some lines on it then that could be one hell of a force-multiplier.
I still had ten skill points left to spend, on account of how I kept getting interrupted by things. Hopefully, with everyone asleep, I’d have some uninterrupted time to browse. Maybe there was a skill in my list of options that would help me with creating formations.
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As it turned out, there were a lot of skills I could now buy that would help me create formations, because they were formations. Each individual formation “spell” was a skill of its own, and now that I had [Formations-] I was apparently eligible to buy them. I was tempted to pick up a few — they all had the Knowledge keyword, meaning I had a chance to get them for free thanks to [Scholar] - but I suspected they were, on the whole, a build trap. My earlier conversations with Nar-shesh, and my own experiences, had confirmed that it was possible to gain skills just by learning how to do things normally. That was probably more time-consuming and difficult than just letting the system teach me, but still - I anticipated learning a lot of different formations, eventually. Skill points were a nonrenewable resource: my time, while in heavy demand, was theoretically unlimited.
There was one formation-recipe skill that I decided to make an exception for, though, speaking of time management. [Azoth-Gathering Formation] allowed me to set up a formation that would draw in and collect the world’s ambient azoth. I could directly absorb it to boost my own respiration rate, or I could use azoth-gathering formations as rechargeable batteries for other formations. I needed azoth to do pretty much anything: giving myself more azoth was functionally equivalent to giving myself more hours in the day. It seemed like a snap pick. So, I picked it.
When I’d acquired [Apophic Tongue], the sensation of instantly learning an entire language had been dizzying. It wasn’t as though it ran me through a hyper-compressed training program like in The Matrix or anything: it was more like I just suddenly remembered something I’d always known. It was only the sheer size of the body of knowledge that had made it disorienting. I suspected that my mind was still sorting through and absorbing the new information, even now. By comparison, [Azoth-Gathering Formation] gave me a much smaller “chunk” of knowledge, so I integrated it with no trouble. However, my new knowledge led immediately to new disappointment. Why?
Because an azoth-gathering formation required ingredients. I would need to use specialized reagents and azoth-resonant materials in setting it up, and the effectiveness and lifespan of the formation would be limited by the quality of the ingredients I could acquire. I fucking knew it was too good to be true.
Whatever. I knew which materials I needed, at least: getting hold of them was just one more item on the to-do list. Maybe I’d put Teekas on it in the morning. She seemed like a go-getter.
Poking around my skill list to see if I could find any workarounds on the materials front, though, I did discover a couple of intriguing skills. [Natural Resources] was an upgrade to [Spontaneous Generation]. It would allow my domain to passively generate useful resources, like rare herbs or veins of ore, consistent with my dungeon mythos. It also boosted the on-kill loot drop rates of all of my minions. I wasn’t wild about that second part, since it made me a more attractive target, but I also wasn’t above farming my own animals for materials. I went ahead and bought it. [Fertile Caverns], a cringe-inducing name, was another offshoot of [Spontaneous Generation] that allowed subterranean layers of my dungeon to passively spawn edible flora and fauna. Since, by the nature of the thing, that was going to be most of the floors, and since winter was coming, it seemed like a good skill to have. It also made it easier to cultivate any food sources adapted for cave life, and specifically synergized with [Natural Resources] to boost the drop rates and quality of edible materials from my cave-dwelling minions. The only downside was that it shifted my mythos towards [Abundance], [Earth], and [Fungus]. I was still leery of committing to a mythos before I knew more about what it entailed, but an army marched on its stomach. I’d been worried about how I was going to feed my goblins, and now I had a way to do so. Soon, there would be fungus among us.
Having spent three of my ten available skill points, I began pondering how to spend the other seven. However, I was once again distracted when I noticed that my new batch of minions had all reached their level target.
Time to see how they’d turned out!