The moment she selects the option to demolish the gem, Avery has a vision take over her senses. Darkness, a spinning bastion of crystal shards with nothing below, slicing, shredding, immobile, deep and impenetrable. Light, the blinding, burning bath of brilliance that brings any who oppose it to their knees. An endless tide of penetrating beams blast down into the depths, shattering on the shadowed shards. The beams do little against the dark bulwark, but with every moment more are created to blast down into the single point of defense. No castle could weather a storm eternally, and the aggressor had far more resources to bring to bear than the defender. However, as the light starts to make progress into the deep depths, she is brought out of the scene to a new text box.

A potential overlord has been detected, and their resistance quashed.

Demolish Subsume

Curious, Avery chooses Subsume.

You have gained 1 mana regeneration for adding Onyx to your crystalline network.

New terms, new source of mana regeneration, and… Dang, she didn’t have the ability to create onyx. Activating demolish once again, Avery selects the chunk of black stone to take apart, only to get another error message, this one more concerning.

Demolish not available on living or undead creatures.

Having that show up again had disturbing implications. Potential overlord was clear, considering the recent revelation that gems cause monsters and dungeons, and whatever she had done was apparently enough to keep this new gem from carving out its own niche in her dungeon. What wasn't clear was whether the Onyx had been alive before Avery tried the subsume option. It was possible that she had just granted an inanimate object sapience, or at least functions akin to those utilized by biological creatures.

Maybe that was what was providing the additional mana regeneration. Some process Avery had kickstarted by using subsumption, which took some unknown property, likely ambient mana, and converted it to utilizable mana, which the newly subsumed stone excretes into Avery's own functions. As a biological entity, in general, Avery would prefer a few more layers of abstraction between herself and her meals, but in a completely practical viewpoint of the situation, it seemed that with a small amount of effort on the part of any agent she would be able to come across, like if she could maybe exile all these slimes as was the wont of developing dungeons and have them return to their nest after gathering resources, she would have the advantage of not having to deal with their upkeep while they were gone as well as the demolishable material brought back. It was possible that if she could figure out how to get rid of the monsters in some way, she might not be completely ruined by the fact there were piles of monsters draining her mana.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

On the other hand, that would kill a lot of people. Took her a little bit to remember that.

Still, at negative two hundred mana drain, Avery would be completely out in less than two hours now that the slime numbers weren't decreasing anymore. Honestly, now that she had all this new information she could almost guarantee herself a spot in the tower. Just the idea that a gem retrieved from a dungeon had the potential to be a dungeon seed when retrieved was enough to generate years of research ideas. Once all the immediate issues were sorted out, Avery could bring gems to this dungeon, subsume them, and put them in a safe-esk spot whereby she could guide the development toward useful avenues. Unlike what she had here, of course, which at this point seemed to be... A somewhat decent first floor, then a second floor maze that suddenly turns into a tunnel going downward for some reason.

Avery was pretty sure she hadn't done that. Slimes didn't usually have that kind of precision with their nest building either; they would carve out a whole expanse into a flat staging ground first, then work from there. The fact the slimes weren't acting as the natural variants in this respect was simultaneously promising and annoying. It implied that what rooms she made wouldn't be immediately devoured, but the slimes also weren't helping to expand her territory into something that would provide enough mana regeneration to offset their existence. That had been her best hope for this to have a good solution.

A new plan came to mind. If she kept digging down through the tunnel, maybe she'd hit lava and burn everything to death when a jet of superheated rock blasted up into the bottom of the second floor. Her body'd probably be fine up on the top.