Happy with his creation, Doyle creates a ton of the pseudo sand inside an empty room. Well, it looks like a room. Viewed from the outside and it showed a different appearance. The walls on the inside all seemed to fit together perfectly, but outside each wall had a bit sticking over the edge of the others.

Since sandstone is in theory a simple enough sediment, Doyle planned to try the simplest method he could think of. Those walls are all put together in such a way that you can’t shrink the inner space. A thing that he promptly begins to do at a slow pace.

Doyle isn’t certain how strong he is, but the chance of going too far and creating more of a solid block than a porous material was not completely impossible. It would in theory be hard, but then again, he hadn’t ever tested his actual strength since becoming a dungeon core. For all he knew, he could have the strength to crush coal into diamonds.

That being an interesting idea, though he put it to the side for later. At the moment he just wants to make some sandstone. Nevermind the failed pile of sand from when he tried to just squeeze it without the stone walls. Now that he has properly secured the sand, applying pressure to any side of the cube is simplicity itself.

So, Doyle presses and presses. This would probably be harder for your average person as they wouldn’t know if it worked until they opened up the container. Good thing Doyle can see what has happened inside with perfect clarity, turning what would have been multiple tests to get the feel right into a single try.

And by single try, Doyle means he only tried the test once. Yet it failed, but he had totally meant to keep pressing until it became a solid block. It totally wasn’t him accidentally going too far and deciding that screw it, might as well see how far it can go.

Now knowing how hard he needs to press, Doyle makes the perfect example of what he wants. There was one final test to do on it, but first he absorbs the block and once again doesn’t get a new pattern. As this was the second time and he was watching for it, there is a bit of a hint as to why this was the case.

While deconstructing the block, even if Doyle does get a sense of how to put it all back together, he also gets a sense of how on a magical level each grain is still a piece of the previous material. This is quite interesting and makes him wonder what one of those machine made diamonds from before the system would feel like.

From what Doyle can tell, certain precious materials do have magical value to them. On top of that, this pseudo sandstone he had just made would not work as a substitute for real sandstone. This points towards natural gems finally having something on the machine made ones besides the mystique that was cultivated by the diamond industry to boost the value of their “natural” gems.

Not that Doyle particularly cares. As far as he can tell, the material he creates from a pattern counts, so he just needs one speck of diamond large enough and he can create as much as he wants. Though this does open up another avenue for leveling up his patterns.

Up until now, Doyle had been focusing on the physical aspects of the material. A perfectly shaped grain of sugar for instance. It seems that he doesn’t just have to pay attention to the physical shape, but the mystical intent as well. A perfect grain of sugar shouldn’t just be the right shape and ingredients. That grain of sugar should also be magically aligned properly as well.

Though Doyle puts that thought aside for the moment. There is too much to look into with that, especially since there are probably near infinite combinations of intent you could say was just right for sugar. Just looking at the four classic elements of fire, water, wind, and earth shows potential. Water aligned sugar for simple syrup, fire aligned if it needs to melt, wind for cotton candy, and earth for stuff like hard candy.

Even just thinking that though turns his thoughts to the other classic system of elements which had five. Though there are only two new elements to deal with, which are wood and metal. Wood being easy enough, just a general boost to the various “raw” sugars. Metal is a little more difficult to figure out, maybe use it for chewing gum? Might make it last longer instead of the usual result of the flavor instantly escaping.

Doyle shakes himself again, interesting topic, but not what he is doing at the moment. He now has something close enough to sandstone that water will seep through it like he wanted. Sure, it is very weak, but he doesn’t plan to make the entire floor out of it. Instead, he does a thin coat of the stuff over any surface he wants water coming from.

This mostly meant the ceiling with a focus on the areas around the stalactites. Though he does swirl it all along the walls so no section of the cave would ever be truly free of the damp. Then he cheated. Out in the world, water would be coming from some aquifer and that is technically true for the tenth floor.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Except instead of the water being saturated in the ground, the aquifer is literally just a giant pool of water, which gravitationally is above everything else. Then Doyle sets up a bunch of tiny channels to guide the water where it needs to go. On the third floor he didn’t have to worry too much about water running out as even being a maze, people didn’t stay too long on the floor. Two kilometers of distance is starting to get up there and people might end up taking a while to clear the floor.

That meant the water not only had to last longer, but it needed somewhere to go. Good thing Doyle had put in those sections where the tunnel expanded down. He wasn’t going to make those areas deep pools of water, but they certainly weren’t going to have dry land at the bottom. Instead, it would be swampy terrain with more of the sandstone to act as a drain of sorts.

All that was left now was getting the water correct. Pure spring water might come from under the ground, but it didn’t come from a limestone cave. All that water seeping down through the rock was picking up minerals and sediment. The water was technically picking up a tiny bit of the stuff while going through his sandstone.

Two problems with that, though. One was that he didn’t actually want the floor eroding away so there was going to be some rules tweaking to make it so that didn’t happen. And two was the fact that even if he did, let it erode the sandstone, it simply wasn’t picking up enough stuff.

Instead, Doyle made a little water recycler. A simple enough thing. Water would filter through a block of his sandstone and drip down into a collection funnel. That funnel would then dump the water out right back on top of the sand stone. Because portals.

Then it was a waiting game until the water reached the mineral saturation that Doyle was looking for. This resulted in the level of his water pattern jumping all the way from four to 21. He isn’t quite sure why it was such a jump, though he can tell that unlike the pseudo sandstone, this mineral rich water actually counted as something new and not just water and something else. Though sadly the suspended silt still wasn’t allowed to count as sand when the water was removed. There seemed to be a step missing somewhere for that to happen.

An interesting thing for later, because now that it was finished Doyle could lay on the next layer of decoration, the soil. While his mushrooms could technically grow on bare rock thanks to this being a dungeon, he wanted to have it be more realistic as well as easier for people to harvest any interesting mushrooms they might want.

First was a good layer of dungeon soil at the bottom of the various large pits. The soil is honestly a little too fertile for this kind of environment, then again it always was. Though at least the nice black soil matched the stone of the area, even if for different reasons.

After that, Doyle spread the soil around the various areas before dumping a bunch of water all over the place. Not only did this form some atmospheric puddles and pools all over the place, but it also washed away any dirt in places it really shouldn’t be. A much easier solution to making the area look natural.

Though speaking of looking natural, the next step is adding in all the shrooms. A task easily accomplished by summoning in a ton of sprout swarms. The little things bumbled all over the place, spreading spores which would grow into random fungi as well as more sprouts occasionally as there were points available and he allowed it. Soon enough, every single bit of soil and sandstone that wasn’t at the top of the ceiling was covered in a carpet of fungus.

Not just normal fungus, though. It seems that floor ten is saturated enough with world energy that the naturally grown shrooms started to deviate. There wasn’t any change that was too big, except for the fact that many ended up being big. The entire tunnel, especially the boss cavern, turned into a literal mushroom forest like you see in fantasy stories. Convenient since that is exactly the kind of location Doyle had been imagining for his Myconids.

That, however, might not have been an accident. After all, Doyle is the dungeon, and so the very intent for this sort of setting might have been the catalyst for it to form. Not that Doyle thought of this on a conscious level, though it was percolating down beneath the surface.

Anyway, whatever the case might be, Doyle is happy with the results and so pulls back to get a nice birds eye view of the floor’s layout. Everything is relatively flat, though that right away makes him frown. All those pools of water are nice, but the water isn’t really draining as well as he would like. This was easy enough to fix though, and didn’t require any real changes.

All Doyle had to do was add the tiniest of slope towards the nearest pit. It wasn’t even enough for someone to notice unless they were really looking for it. The kind of flat where you would put a pencil down on the surface with the expectation of it staying in place only to be shocked when it rolls away.

After that it was time to plan the small myconid villages and how many of the mushroom men he was going to have on the floor. First step is of course to subtract ten percent of the spending limit, that way there would be enough space in the farm to have a replacement for every monster. No more than a single replacement of course, but with myconids and how they can multiply like crazy there isn’t as much worry about keeping a breeding pair.

Though Doyle does take the current batch of sprouts and marks them as separate. Spores might easily turn real enough to reproduce, but it still took time for the sprouts to actually start growing new myconids. Sure, technically, he could probably get away with just one sprout being kept back to repopulate the floor. Doyle however wanted to keep at least some of the experience they might develop.

Anyway, after taking out that Doyle is left with 30,132 points to spend on monsters. Except since he isn’t using goats or any of the other lower-cost monsters those trailing 32 points are meaningless. After all, the cheapest monster he is going to use is the Lesser Myconid, which clocks in at 150 points.