Having finalised the name of the newest member of her dungeon, Silky naturally fulfilled the conditions that would enable the Flenemon to become an intrinsic part of her. It was the beginning of a process of magically promoting the creature even further than by any means of natural evolution such as through fighting, predation or gaining levels.

So after having named the creature Jeremy, she then unknowingly and intrinsically diverted a tiny sliver of her outgoing dungeon-mana to slowly transform the already-improving monster. It was the same vein of power that linked her to her Toadshrool Lorry and the Pale-Gintbug drone Jeff. With both of her chosen “friends” both already transitioning into elite forms of their kind through her benign amelioration.

If she were a biological being then with every supposed intake of “breath”, she absorbed the excess mana that exuded from all things that lived and gained levels within her domain before purifying the energy and then amplifying it before storing and releasing it out again to blanket her territory as dungeon-mana. Although the amount of mana that she gained from her budding ecosystem was considerable, it still was nought but a trickle when compared to the torrent of mana that she greedily absorbed from the cave system beyond her entrance.

The mana in the air was a aimless and directionless force, whereas she could distil the energy whilst simultaneously branding it with her own will before directing it into her own applications. Right now most of it still went into improving her small mushroom-forest to promote its growth by using her nearly deific dungeon-mana as a crutch for the absence of nutrients and the input of energy into her synthetic ecology from twin-light, some of it went into enlarging her home by carving out the cave walls and a even smaller portion of it still was funnelled into her “friends”.

What Silky had also found out recently with the help of her quirky companion, was the fact that she could gain new templates through dissimilation before absorption of new inanimate objects. After gaining a template, she would then be able to replicate the items at will through the use of her dungeon-mana. The shapes and sizes of the would-be newly minted items would be up to her own imagination, but the basic materials could be made from any “templates.”

It was a very interesting new ability but one that Silky did not find much interest in due to the disadvantages involved with the processes of creation. Firstly the items would be of an exorbitant cost in dungeon-mana which could be exacerbated by the rarity or molecular structure of the base template and secondly, the act of creation divested a large portion of her attention away from expansion and reinforcement of her domain. It required too much of her currently very limited mental processing power to imagine the shape, hold it, formalize a spell structure, power the spell with an exhalation of dungeon-mana before actualizing it all in succession.

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It was quite thrilling at first when she was making the pencils but her creation-spree had resulted in her depleting her dungeon-mana and her falling into a sleep-like stupor. It was the first time that Silky felt so powerless and vulnerable, more so than before she had laid her roots when she was still a core-seed where her worldly stimuli’s were narrow and neutered.

So unless Mister Gerald specifically asked for any more items, Silky was not particularly interested in creating new items. It was better off that she focused on the natural and soothing act of buttressing her ecosystem which in turn would increase her own passive mana intake. Improvement and safety just felt like the most important concepts to the baby core right now, even if Mister Gerald provided a interesting diversion from time to time.

It was fascinating to her to interact with Mister Gerald and see him be reborn from time to time from that bush of his. She also did initially try to probe the bushes and him to see if she could understand the mechanics of the process, but she was repulsed by a natural barrier that she had also found when she had tried to do the same with mister Lorenzo when she had first formed. It was not a problem when she created Lorry, subsumed Jeff and Jeremy or the easily assimilated worm-things Mister Gerald had brough back in his most recent foray.

The same little things that have proven to be a fantastic addition to her dungeon. They had quickly bred and multiplied under the application of her dungeon-mana before spreading throughout her ecosystem near the system as they fed on decaying fungal matter before processing it and excreting out a nutrient-rich fertilizer. They were a small yet integral cog that fitted perfected into her ecosystem to create a nutrient feedback-loop that enabled her mushroom-forest to more efficiently recycle its waste vegetative matter.

They were simply fantastic.

Catching her own thoughts wandering again at the thought of the multitudinous recyclers, Silky reined it back in before carving more out of the cave walls to expand her home.

Then sparing a thought to observe the sleeping Mister Gerald beside her core who had brought her the wonderful grubs, she decided she might as well go through the effort and create one more jar of Cider that he seemed to worship so much as a thank-you gift.

All though Silky was starting to think that twenty was too many.