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Slowly Quin regained his consciousness. At first he was disoriented and began panicking when he couldn't move his limbs, but then he slowly regained his memories.

"Open . Self status." was his first mental command. The specific command did not matter as it only was crutch Mana cultivators could use to better direct their Mana to do what they wanted. With enough familiarity with the spells crutches like chants, commands or gestures could be abandoned later on.

The is one of the innate magics that all dungeon cores possess as it helps them manage their dungeon by giving them information on possible creature and environment creations as. It can also provide information and knowledge that the caster originally does not possess like the level of training intruders possess and what they specialize in. The divine sense all cultivators train and use is thought to be inspired through the magic and similar to that divine sense was also limited to cultivators on the same stage of training or lower.

He got information that unfortunately were nothing new to him. There were no cracks in his crystal, he had the basic minimum mana he needed to live and he had 0% Mist-Mana Cultivation. Mist-Mana is the most basic mana that every magical being that cultivates starts with and by cultivating and later transforming it they can progress in their cultivation. Monsters were an exception as they passively absorbed mana but didn't actively cultivate it.

The term 'cultivating' formed, because progressing ones Mana capacity was often compared to growing a plant. If you cultivate, you grow your effective Mana pool and the growth progress you are currently at and the whole process was creatively named 'cultivation'. Ancient Mana users could be dubbed geniuses when it came to this so called cultivation and its techniques but their naming sense was truly unoriginal. But since there was no use in fighting the established terminology he just went with it like the rest and now no one even questions them anymore.

Slightly dejected at the loss of all his painstaking cultivation he began scanning his surroundings and found himself to be encased in solid stone. Slowly he then began using his Mana to dig a room around him. A few hours later he finally dug a 5x5x5 room with himself at the center. That he managed to dig this room in only a few hours and not a few days was all thanks to an advanced mana gathering technique for dungeons that he had traded for a considerable amount of divine power with a dungeon that had just ascended for a few days and was in desperate need for energy to rebuild his defenses. 

That was one of the main ways he and his friends had gathered information on dungeons. They split into groups of 4 people and sniffed out new dungeons through various means and then friendly reminded them that the trade was very favorable for the dungeon, which it was, and that dungeon crystals were awfully fragile, which they were.

New dungeons almost always had the instinct to dig until they reached the surface and leave 2 puppet monsters in even intervals in the tunnel. Only when they were done with that did they begin to draw in Mana to cultivate. 

Quin however knew that it was better to first train oneself and build a healthy ecosystem with non-puppet monsters so that the time he would have to spend waiting for cultivators could be used by the monsters to reproduce and establish their nests. Although puppet-monsters only cost 1/10th of the Mana of regular monsters they have no real mind of their own, only stay in their designated areas and attack anything that attacks them or that isn't native to the dungeon. 

A big boon that dungeons received was that all inhabitants had an extremely short maturation period while leaving their original lifespan as it was in the wild. This leads to dungeons being filled with all kinds of creatures constantly at war for territory and naturally attacking everyone that knowingly (other monsters) ors unknowingly (intruders) encroaches on it. Another side effect is that no one in the dungeon ever suffers from hunger as they either manage to hunt prey or get preyed on very quickly.

Slowly he began to draw in mana and started cultivating according to his cultivation technique. When he reached 10% Mist-Mana he finally surpassed the first hurdle as a new dungeon. A dungeon with 10% Mist-Mana can dig and control one moderately sized floor since that is all his Mana can support. He then began to dig his tunnel until he almost reached the surface. 

Afterwards he began to widen his tunnel at regular intervals and slowly more and more rooms cropped up. After creating a good number of rooms began to branch out and create secondary tunnels and he also started collapsing his original tunnel at a few points so that intruders wouldn't be able to just waltz through to him. When he was done with that he began expanding behind his original room. 

After one week he was finally done with digging. He had dug immortal caves for himself, but this was a whole different dimension. In the beginning there wasn't much one had to pay attention to other then not keeping the first straight corridor one had dug. When he had regained his expended Mana he started the next phase of his plan for new start. Monsters.

At first he would have access to a limited selection of random basic creature that existed on the world he reincarnated in. This selection would expand step by step as he progressed along with his cultivation. This was one function of the Magic that was unique to dungeons. Most of the time the magic was used for strictly administrative tasks or explorations of unchartered territory.

"Open . Creature list." Once the command was given a very long list popped into his mind. First he selected basic . These were basically normal animals that could absorb minuscule amounts of Mana and very rarely also evolved into  with . They could basically be seen as Rank 0 .

First he selected various insects and worms that would be at the bottom of his dungeons food chain. He then spread them evenly across the rooms and added Basic like mosses, fungi and grass for them to feed on. After a bit of contemplation he added plants that looked just like the others but had special effects like inducing sleep through pollen or paralyzing through ingestion. The inhabitants of his dungeon would be immune to that but it would discourage overzealous cultivators from picking his dungeon clean as these plants could be used for pill-concoction.

As the dungeon was too dark for the other creatures he wanted to put there he began placing . These crystals were a type of life form that glowed in a light blue tone and sprouted little crystalline roots into the stone walls. Through these roots they would regrow with the ambient Mana when cultivators harvested them.

Then he began adding rats, mice, bats, lizards, amphibians and snakes. They would feed on the smallest creatures or plants and be food to the slightly bigger animals or monsters who couldn't really be bothered to go hunting for insects. Afterwards he created a  tunnel system which was just the right size for the little critters and their nests as he didn't want them to be wiped out by their predators and he also added little streams of infinite water that would flow out of cracks in the ceiling. 

These little streams would feed the many small and medium sized depressions he created in the ground and form ponds for the amphibians and fish he added and then flow into a hole in the ground back into the nothingness they came from. He pondered for a few moments where these streams came from and went to but in the end he couldn't come up with a satisfactory solution and wrote it off as one of the illogical quirks that would occasionally pop up when magic was involved.

After waiting for two days in which all the added animals were done setting up their nests and producing the first offspring he added the first  to the dungeon. He was unfortunately limited to beasts at Rank 1 and Stage 1, the equivalent of his 10% Mist-Mana cultivation as anything below that would just constitute as a and anything stronger would be at risk to slip his control and exit the dungeon as soon as he opened the entrance. That would just be a big waste of Mana. 

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And so he added and as swarm creatures that were weak individually but bested their foes with superior numbers, and that lived in small groups that were hard to kill because they were either very quick or just had the best defense, and  as hard to deal with individualist as they used acid and poison and and that would form small communities and were relatively harmless as they would only attack if provoked.

Apart from the last two species the rest of them were pretty self explanatory. are a type of golem that could reproduce and have an exceptional camouflage capability in the mountains or in caves. They only feed on stones and Mana which makes them perfect for this environment. Furthermore their feces can be eaten by the other inhabitants of the dungeon to harden their skins and maybe trigger an evolution for some and the longer a lives the more ores they generate in their body, making them a popular prey for many aspiring blacksmiths.

The are Mushrooms with little stubby arms and feet and also eyes and a mouth. They have very good regenerative abilities for such weak monsters since they can just sit on the ground, stretch out their mycelium and absorb the nutrients and ambient Mana faster. Another upside of them is that they can reproduce easily by just spreading their pollen on existing fungi, causing some of them to evolve. Unfortunately their only way to attack is by running up to their enemies and trying to ram them with their surprisingly hard caps.

Their bodies are a treasure trove of grade 1 crafting materials. Many budding cultivators craft their caps into shields, use their mycelium as the base for regenerative pills and potions and collect their pollen to start farms.

When Quin was finally satisfied with his dungeon he began designing a . The  is always the most powerful being that currently resides on a floor and the designation as  has a special relevance, because it is a