The natural progression for animals and plants in this world, as their levels grew, seemed straightforwardly to be “get bigger.” The two owls I’d empowered weren’t quite as large as Striga, and were still Owls rather than Giant Mutant Owls, but they were easily two or three feet tall. The snake, likewise, had grown from shoestring to garden hose. The pine tree had more than doubled in height - I’d picked a sapling, though, level 0, so it was less impressive than it sounded. Still, it was probably around 20 feet tall.

The squirrel had not turned out the same as the others. Like them, it had grown larger, and was now approximately the size of a small cat. Unlike them, it had apparently been the beneficiary of [Mutagenic Domain], at least once if not multiple times. How could I tell? Well, if the system designation of "Mushquirrel" wasn’t enough of a clue, the shelves of fungus growing from its body and the gruesome crown of mushrooms that had consumed the upper half of its skull, including the eyes, were dead giveaways. I supposed I had [Fertile Caverns]’ shift of my dungeon mythos [Fungus]-ward to thank for this development. The mutated squirrel didn’t seem to be in any particular distress. It hadn’t even woken up from its evolution, still dozing peacefully in its dray. I pulled up its description.

Mushquirrel (Minion) - Lv. 5

[Blind] [Sleep]

A squirrel whose body has become a garden for symbiotic fungus. It still hoards nuts, but now they serve as fertilizer for its fungal brethren.

Health:

██

?/?

Azoth:

█████

?/?

XP:

░░░░░

?/?

[Skills]

[Fungal Firewall]

Strong resistance to all psychic attacks from non-[Fungus] sources.

[Fungal Gardener]

Moderate increase to farming skill when growing and harvesting [Fungus]. Small increases to crop quality and crop yield for [Fungus] crops.

[Mycelial Communion]

This creature is enmeshed in a mycorrhizal network. It can telepathically access any [Fungus] network node within short range. This communion has supplanted many of its ordinary senses.

Okay, fascinating. If it got all this just at level 5, maybe a [Fungus] power suite was the real deal. Strong was the biggest variable term I’d seen the system offer outside of my own [Greater Azoth Pool+] and [Greater Azoth Respiration+] skills, which offered massive bonuses and which I figured were probably outliers. Even so, I didn’t think I’d be aiming for a [Fungus] mythos if I could avoid it. No hate, just not my preferred flavor of freaky.

I looked through the other minions’ skills. Not being able to ask them, I wasn’t sure if animals got fewer skill points than sapient creatures, or just had a lot fewer options to spend them on: either way, all of them had fewer skills than they did levels. The owls had [Night Vision], [Keen Hearing+] and [Silent Flight], the snake had [Constrict] and [Sense Heat], and the pine tree had [Cold Resistance] and [Flammable], the latter of which seemed to be a strict downside in the same vein as [Monster]. Chompy the cave lamprey, too, had fewer skills than levels. Striga was out of range, hunting: I’d have to take a more thorough look at her when she got back, to compare her to the others. The fact that all of the minion-animals had gotten physically larger without any intervention on my part, though, had me kicking myself a little bit for wasting so much azoth enlarging her back then. Oh well, something to keep in mind for the future.

I wondered why bigger was automatically better. Was a squirrel better-suited for its environment by being larger? This would probably make it harder to climb on branches, right? And the birds - the bigger you were, the hungrier you were, as evidenced by Striga’s ravenous appetite. It did increase their direct combat power, to an extent. Was the reason as simple as that? Or was this the system’s hand on the scale, weighting evolution in a particular direction?

I wouldn’t find the answer tonight, that was for sure. If I assumed that the transformation into a Mushquirrel was one instance of mutation, then with twenty-five levels gained and one mutation I was looking at around a 4% mutation rate. That seemed pretty small for a small chance - in my opinion, 4% was pushing very small. And that was with the increased mutation chance for levelling, as opposed to just spending time in the domain. Well, twenty-five levels wasn’t a huge sample size, and I still had a good bit of azoth left. I’d just level up another batch of minions and see what that got me! And while I was doing that, I could experiment with formations some more, or get back to figuring out how I wanted to spend my eight remaining skill points.

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

I passed the rest of the night in that fashion. My efforts to spend all of my skill points were for naught. First, I became deeply immersed in my study of formations and lost track of time. Then, when my second batch of minions turned up no observable mutations, I got frustrated and impulsively committed the azoth for a third batch. Then, I got distracted trying to make crystals that wouldn’t explode when I attached them to the light-generating formations. I was unsuccessful, if you were wondering, but I did manage to finally reverse-engineer [Minor Magelight Formation] to an extent that the system deemed worthy of recognition. That, plus all the minion-leveling, pushed me over the boundary to level 14, which gave me a whole bunch of new skill options to consider and thereby cast my deliberations into chaos. In summary, I greeted the dawn in a state of mental and emotional fatigue that was almost as bad as the times I’d stayed up all night as a human.

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Things got a little better once the goblins were awake, at least. Breakfast came and went without anyone volunteering to become my minion, even Sarsu who had been so gung-ho on the idea last night, but I figured that was fair: I probably had a fair amount of trust to earn back after the cave lamprey incident. The cooling of enthusiasm on that front notwithstanding, I was able to ask the goblins what they knew about formations. It turned out that Ergiza, the goblin with the baby, and her cousin Immir-shesh, who I learned she didn’t get along with, were skilled craftsgoblins who incorporated formation-work into their creations. Ergiza was a flint-knapper, making stone tools for the village. She was happy to show me the scars on her feet from times when her punch-tool had slipped and punched holes in her, rather than punching flakes off of the rock. Immir-shesh was a basket-weaver, and he did not have any interesting scars to share.

They were both in an awkward spot with their craft. Ergiza had no way to create the precise, finely-detailed engravings that would be required to permanently place formations on stone tools, so her formations were painted onto the tools’ surfaces and had to be regularly touched-up as the azoth channelled through the formations burned their “circuits” out. Immir-shesh wove the arrays into the very structure of his baskets, but they were just made of ordinary wicker: they couldn’t channel more than the merest whisper of azoth. He could weave a refrigerated basket that would keep fish frozen for months, but the basket itself would catch fire or crumble to dust in a week.

In short, they were both held back by their materials, not their skills. In fact, both of them knew more formations than they’d ever crafted. They responded with enthusiasm when I told them about [Natural Resources], and at my promise to begin my own experiments into creating higher-quality materials for them to work with. They were considerably less enthusiastic when I asked them to work together on researching and emplacing formations to make the dungeon more defensible. However, the necessity of their task was self-evident, so even though neither of them were happy about it, they agreed.

All the discussion of stone tools gave me an idea. The rock under my domain was limestone, which was not particularly useful for making stone tools, but if I’d been able to do improvised carpentry with [Dungeon Domain], why not improvised flint-knapping? As I’d expected, it was disproportionately azoth-intensive - some property of items, of made things, resisted the skill’s effects - but I was able to sharpen the few stone axes that the group had carried with them to a near-invisible edge. They cut through wood like it was…well, not quite butter, but at least like much softer wood. That sped up the process of felling and shaping logs for the palisade, which was good.

In the light of day, I also noticed that my second batch of minions, which I’d thought mutation-less, was actually anything but. Several of them now bore markings of deep pomegranate-red, the same color as the new feathers that had replaced Striga’s burned ones. The snake from the first batch was in fact entirely red, snout to tail. The color change didn’t have any mechanical effects, as far as I could tell, but I liked dark reds a lot. I felt a pleasant satisfaction as I watched the affected minions go about their animal business.

Also while all of that was going on, I was talking to Nar-shesh and Teekas while I levelled the latter up, directing the wall-raising crew, and dungeonforming the cavern layer. How was I doing all of that at once, you ask? The catalyst had been the one new skill I had managed to buy last night during a scarce moment of focus — the ironically-named [Walk and Talk]. It branched off of [Boss], although apparently one could access it through various other social or leadership skills. [Walk and Talk] had the simple but powerful effect of eliminating the cognitive load of carrying on a conversation. In other words, I could now talk to someone — or, as I quickly discovered, talk to multiple people at once — while still being able to pay complete attention to whatever else I was doing at the time. No loss of detail, no loss of recall. It was true multitasking — simultaneous trains of parallel thought, not merely switching one’s attention back and forth between things very quickly.

For a human using the skill, I think they would still only be able to carry on one conversation while doing something else — maybe two, if the second one was just them listening to someone talk — on account of only having one mouth. However, [The Heart Speaks] had no such limitation, allowing me to hold as many simultaneous conversations as I cared to spend the azoth for.

Experimenting with using [The Heart Speaks] in multiple places at once, after I’d picked up [Walk and Talk], had made me realize that I’d been too limited in my thinking — too human. I had no idea what the interior of my dungeon core body looked like or how it worked, but come on, it was fucking magic! A human brain could only pay attention to one thing at once, and I’d been assuming that was the case for a dungeon brain as well. Turned out, it wasn’t. My natural ability to multitask as a dungeon wasn’t unlimited, but I discovered that paying attention to two or three things at once was easy even before [Walk and Talk] entered the equation.

None of this, of course, changed how tired and stressed-out I was. However, I was being tired and stressed-out in an incredibly time-efficient way. Things were going well!

Things were going well.

So, of course, when trouble showed up, it brought a friend.

The first thing that went wrong was Teekas hitting level 9. She and Nar-shesh and I had been chatting while we worked on the palisade, strategizing for the future and planning our next moves. I’d been steadily drip-feeding azoth into Teekas’ experience bar all the while. There was a cheerful ding from the system as she hit level 9. She’d set her surgically-sharp stone axe down, wiped the sweat from her brow, and given a weary but pleased smile as she opened her mouth to say something.

Then, her teeth started falling out. Unsurprisingly, she started screaming and clutching her face. I imagine that was because whatever was happening to her hurt pretty significantly, but she might also have been trying to catch her teeth as they fell out of her gums into the dead leaves and dirt of the forest floor like so many seeds from a tree. I should add that I was also screaming in alarm at this point, as presumably was Nar-shesh. Teekas’ face was yanked free of her hands when her back went rigid, head thrown back, veins standing out on her face. I got a first-row seat to the alarming number of razor-sharp, triangular fangs pushing their way free of her bloody gums.

Extremely familiar razor-sharp triangular teeth, it occurred to me. I briefly split my attention to look through my cave pools. Yep, extremely familiar. Hey, Chompy, how’s things?

While my third-ever sentient minion was having her introduction, courtesy of [Mutagenic Domain], to lycanthropy — or lampretakobalopy, I guess, given that she’s a goblin turning into a lamprey rather than a human turning into a wolf, but that’s probably not super important right now — the second crisis struck. The older and younger goblin siblings, who I’d learned were named Harig and Enlil-itu, had left my domain earlier to forage in the woods. Presently, they came barreling up the ramps to the hilltop, sweating and out of breath. “Humans! Humans!” they yelled, talking over each other in a garbled rush. “A bunch of ‘em- pitchforks and- don’t know if they saw us but they’re definitely headed this way- [Angry Mob]-”

Fuck!!!

“Nar-shesh, get everyone down in the cave,” I said. “And tell Kizurra he can have the crossbow back, as long as he doesn’t fucking point it at anything that’s not a fucking human while it’s loaded.”

“But Teekas-” he said.

“Sarsu!” I yelled. “Help your fucking daughter, please!” I didn’t wait for a response. “Striga! Striga!! Wake your fluffy ass up, we’ve got company!” My feathered champion did not immediately respond to my summons. In fact, as I cast my awareness about my domain, I didn’t see her anywhere. Man, this whole situation was her fault to begin with. The least she could do was help me kill our way out of it. Where the hell was that owl? She came back after her nightly hunt, right?

…Right?