I lost track of time, fiddling with different impurities, checking the projected results, and then inspecting my minions' needs to see if they matched. I wanted to save mana by giving plants deeper in my dungeon light, so they could photosynthesize. I couldn't have it on all the time, though, because I had bats and bugs and things that probably wanted some darkness to sleep in.
After way too much time spent on a single problem, I realized that I could use more than one impurity on a single template, and a whole new dimension of possibilities opened up. I synchronized the light decoration to the light coming in through the dungeon entrance, then tweaked it a bit until it mimicked the actual light levels outside, which were surprisingly easy to figure out with a little memory searching. I spent the impurities to save the template, then to create the decoration in my core room.
My first thought was 'beautiful'. The bumblebee figurines sparkled and shone in the artificial sunlight, and my core on its pedestal almost seemed to glow with the way the light refracted inside it. I spent a long couple of hours admiring myself as the light source slid along the ceiling, its angle shifting to match the location of the sun in the sky outside, then mentally shook myself out of it. I had other things to do, like check on the tunnel to my second room!
It was a bit deeper. Maybe a couple of feet. This was going to take a while.
I opened the dungeon editor and played with the currently nonexistent second room. I tweaked the pedestal that was going to be in the center so that it wouldn't look like the one I was on now, I added a depression around it so I could have a moat, things like that. Then I took another look at the automated programs I'd made before... they were already outdated, as compared to my impurity intake and use needs. It would take a while to update, especially by myself, but I didn't have biological needs to get in the way anymore. Hobbyist programmer heaven.
I turned off all of the current automated impurity spending and wrote an entirely new script, one that would spend any full impurities I collected past five of a kind on core expansion (so I could hold more impurities, obviously). I also turned off automated creation of quartz rings, for a couple of reasons - one, my pedestal was full; two, I might want the quartz for other things. And three, the granite spaces were bothering me. There was only one mica ring, toward the bottom, and it still left a gap.
I reabsorbed the solid mica ring, then filled the remaining spaces with more quartz, covering up the rest of the granite and leaving my pedestal properly shiny. Then I opened the dungeon editor again and ensured that my next pedestal would be larger and more impressive than my current one - I added a step under it so it would be raised up a bit, made it taller, and put some claw shaped details around the top to sort of cradle the air around where my core would go. Then I turned my attention back to the first room, my current core room.
It wasn't going to be a core room once my new room was done, and it was going to need to look completely different.
I spent the rest of the night and, judging by the shift in lighting from nearly nonexistent to red to orange to bright, a good piece of the next day queuing changes to take effect only after my core moved to its new home atop a new, richly decorated pedestal. It took more time than I expected to build in moving the home for my bats and shifting (rather, destroying and recreating) the falling snow decoration (and a home for my icy bumblebees), but I managed it by the time the sun went down.
I thought about rewarding myself for a job well done by reliving some of my old memories, but then it occurred to me that the first room needed more work.
...
......
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
.............
I didn't surface again until past sunrise the next day. I made the right choice when I designed the lighting for my dungeon. My core room was bathed in the crisp light of day, and the gentle change from the dark of night through twilight hadn't disturbed my focus at all. A gentle mist beaded on the walls in my entryway and dampened the petals of my edelweiss flowers, which were free of bumblebees for a change - the swarm seemed to not like getting their wings wet, and had taken to waiting for the "rain" that had fallen during the night to stop before they got breakfast. My mountain bats hadn't settled down yet - they were still flitting about the hall, chasing one another and squeaking. Now that there were three of them, they weren't lonely anymore, which was a bit of a relief.
A low hum from very near the entrance to my core room caught my attention. The icy bumblebees had woken up and were
starting their day. When droplets of mist landed on their wings, they froze immediately into tiny flecks of ice and the massive insects shook them off. The pine needle mat they were flying out of seemed different than I expected - I took a closer look at it. There was a bulge under the frost-covered floor cover that hadn't been there before. As I watched, it raised up just a tiny bit higher. With a twist of will, I opened an information menu about it.
Icy Bumblebee Nest
I supposed that made a bit of sense. Only, not really. I'd been thinking of my icy bumblebees as just like regular bumblebees, but bigger and covered in frost, and my ordinary bumblebees didn't make an elaborate nest. This mutation business was stranger than it looked at first glance. How exciting. What other changes would I see, when I mutated more minions?
I checked on my new, under construction, core room. It was almost finished. Finally. There were so many things I wanted to try once I had more space.
I watched, giddy with anticipation, as granite melted away to reveal more and more space. Finally, after what seemed like hours (but was more like thirty minutes) of watching, I got the popup I'd written.
Move Core? Y/N
YES~!
The world went dark. I couldn't feel my dungeon! I could barely feel a sense of movement, a hazy nausea that clashed with my understanding of myself as an inorganic organism with no digestive system, and the exhaustion that could only have come from my mana being spent on something by the fistful. My mind spun, I felt heavy and light in turns; it wasn't painful, exactly, but it seemed like it should be. Then everything popped back into place, and my core was sitting pretty on the shiny new pedestal I'd designed. My new core room was dark, the only source of light was the hall leading to my old core room. I got to work fixing that.
...
......
Once I had the lighting in my new core room set up to my liking, I took a look around. The tunnel to the third (and final) room that I'd pre-designed hadn't started yet. It looked like automated changes took effect from the front of the dungeon first and worked their way back. That was fine, I was in no hurry; I hadn't even had anything other than animals come in yet, and any visitors I might find myself entertaining would have to come in through the entrance.
My bats dropped a bit when they passed through the last of the falling snow between the entryway and the first room, but the decoration was already fading out, and they were soon in their new roost, squeaking softly and fluffing their wings. Falling snow appeared at the end of the hall leading to my new core room, just like I'd set up in planning. Depressions were forming in the floor where I'd decided to put flower beds, and it occurred to me that these flowers, too, would need to be watered and fertilized.
I opened the dungeon editor and resolved to put my (weak, rusty) engineering skills to good use. It couldn't be that hard to build an automated irrigation system in a magic cave that was, for all intents and purposes, my own body where I had total control of everything.
---
Viscount Wilder rubbed the pad of his thumb over a carefully written letter that had not been addressed to him. It seemed Tower Master Twenty-Seven was a bit too ambitious for a man of his station.
"Tenson," he said, neither speaking softly nor raising his voice.
The Viscount did not jump or start in any way when his personal servant was, suddenly, behind him, as though he had been there all along.
"Retrieve the files on adventuring teams. Which ones are available, which ones are competent, and which ones are... well." He smiled pleasantly.
"At once, master."
Tenson was gone as completely and quickly as he'd arrived.