I looked around the gray landscape before me and tried to make up my mind on what to do first, I raised my gaze to meet earth and decided then and there that I needed to make sure I'm hidden for the mean time, this whole thing is pointless if they figure out I'm here in a few days.

Claiming a domain isn't that noticeable, but if the moon suddenly gain a surplus of flora and fauna, that would be grounds for suspicion and eventual investigations and expeditions. My first step was to create and overhead illusion so the moon and its surrounding still look normal.

This took a week to accomplish due to me being a novice dungeon core... I may have vast power and potential, but I lack any real experience outside of claiming things and dominating lifeforms. I know what to do, but I need practice, time and effort to really use anything... If I'm not careful I could destroy this wonderful opportunity.

The illusion would only last a month before it needed to be recast, now since that is out the way I should probably create my first lifeforms... It has just dawned on me the that the moon doesn't have a life sustaining atmosphere... no oxygen no organisms... crap... I didn't think this through.

When after finding that out I see why dungeons start on life bearing worlds, but never mind that... this complicates things a little, but nothing is impossible because I'm a dungeon core, now normally we don't have to worry about things like atmosphere or temperature on the starting world, but this makes no difference, I'll just have to go through some extra steps before I start the real art project.

My first major goal is making the atmosphere within my domain livable, but for now I know the perfect monsters to start with. The image of a metallic liquid enters my mind as I used hundreds of mana threats to weave my creations into existence.

A little gelatinous ball of silver goo lands on the ground and begins aimlessly hopping across the lunar landscape, in another places huge pools of silver goo appear and fill the small craters covering the lunar surface.

And here are my first monsters, the Mercury Slime and Mercury Sludge Fiend. One is a blob of living Mercury with the life goal of leaping onto living organisms... they are heavily poisonous and can creep through small gaps, they hate staying still and often run into each other, meeting of mercury slimes usually result in a bigger slime as they merge together or a smile heard as they dispose being alone.

The Mercury sludge fiend is a stationary pool of mercury that can form tendrils and appendages to manipulate their surroundings and drag prey into their depths... they often get bored and just move around the dust and rocks for fun, when the slimes first approached them they tried and failed to drown the slimes.

I watched for hours at the slimes interacted with the various fiends across the lunar landscape, after a while the fiends give up and release the slimes, meanwhile the slimes find it fun to be manhandled... benefits to not feeling pain I guess.

In some places I could see tendrils of mercury interacting with slimes, it reminds me of a child poking an animal with a stick... after a while they seemed to have formed a weird relationship, the slimes would hang around the pools until the fiends would decide to through them around.

The slimes would in turn move a few rocks closer to the fiends, the fiends natural tendency to get bored quickly may come in handy as across the moon I could see some fiends stacking rocks into towers and walls... I swear I never meant for the slimes to become the pets of the fiends... It just kind of happened.

One fiend on the dark side of the moon made a wall around their crater to keep all the slimes they found and the slimes seem okay with it as they still had room to move. I glance over to the light side of the moon... is that one playing fetch?... I look closer to see a tendril of mercury holding a rock and a group of slimes jumping, trying to retrieve it.

It chucks the rock and it floats for awhile before landing a considerable distance away... all the slimes dash off into the distance to get it and a few minutes later the group of slimes return with the yoga ball sided rock... I see they have discovered the concept of teamwork.

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I sat there pondering whether it was trying to teach them to go get more rock and bring them back or if it's just playing fetch with them... maybe both? let's just go with that for now.

I ready myself to create my next monsters when an idea hits me, while doing my research on metal I discovered rust and decay in metals... after a day or so of designing I glance down at my newest creations, the rust urchin and sentient rust cloud.

The rust urchin is a small ball sized slime like creature with a red, orange and brown color with little spikes jutting out from all sides except the part the touches the ground, the roll across the lunar surface and find a place to call home where they extend their rusty spikes as a warning.

The rust cloud is as it says, a living cloud of magic rust, it causes all solid metals to decay at extreme rates, the only way I see them being beaten is with enchanted armor or warding charms, some chose to float across the surface while most took to the sky and became orange clouds.

I created some iron cubes at random across the moon to see my rustling at work... rustlings... that could work as a species name... I'll think about it later. The urchin rolled around in circles to pick up speed and hurled themselves at the cubes, they pierced them and continuously retracted and extending spikes to repeatedly stab the cubes.

The cloud would swarm the cubes and all that would be left would be piles of rust or husk of the cubes. I waited to see how my monsters would interact with ones outside of their material... It went better that expected.

The clouds largely ignored the other monsters while the urchins took to the mercury based ones with ease, they played tag with the slimes and interacted with the fiends like the slimes did.

I observed the behavior for a few days and made some small changes, the urchins like being thrown at high speed and since they are partially solid they tend to break whatever they hit, this lead to the fiends making towers and walls just to break them... some even use the urchins to break apart the larger lunar rocks.

It seems it equal amounts of work and play, slimes and urchins get to have fun and the fiends get to collect more rocks, the clouds just observe the ground dwellers and rarely interact outside of passing by, the slimes found the destroyed cubes and even some of the intact ones.

The played around in the rust dust like an animal in sand or attempted to climb it, some took the cubes to the fiends and so on and so forth, these interactions inspired two more changes.

I gave the slimes to ability to consume other minerals and metals, this lead to them eating rocks, rust and the iron from the cubes. When they ate enough rust or stayed in a rust cloud they had the chances to become urchins, when the ate enough rocks they became boulder slimes, car sided slimes that could change shape and harden into a solid form when inactive, the ones who ate iron obviously became iron slimes, still made of mercury but can harden and turn into iron... I also gave them the power to transmit small electrical burst.

The moon became more lively as the fiends had many new companions to toy around with, the boulder slimes especially as they could become various shapes and be used in structures, the boulder slimes are less active and are prone to going inactive so they don't mind being used in structures.

The iron slimes were popular as for some reason most of my creatures like being shocked... is it because they are made of metal or what... I don't know but it's kind of cute in my eyes.

The fiends love the iron slimes a bit more due to the shocks and because they make good tools as they can harden into different shapes... I gave them the idea of using them that way and they took to it like a fish to water, they would hold the slimes at the end of their tendrils and communicate what shape to take for what purpose... I can wait to where that goes.

The iron slimes and the rust clouds have a weird relationship, the iron slimes would essentially feed the rust clouds little bits of themselves which would grow back after a while, now somewhere in the lunar desert there are a group of iron slimes trying to domesticate the rust clouds... this could be interesting... we'll check back on them in a while.

I look at the time and realize it's been two weeks since I made the mercury lifeforms... I'm not gonna lie when I said I only intended to make the mercury organisms and got side tracked... why do I feel this is gonna happen a lot.

Okay now onto the other two creatures I was supposed to make, the lunar stone constructs and the personification of dark and cold... a yes, my first beings that could be classified as eldritch beings... I'm gonna have so much fun with these two.

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Somewhere down on earth, an adventure wakes up from a nightmare and looks around, he searches his room for a phone and calls someone, "Yes guild master, what is it" the voice on the other side said. "I want you to up the search for any new cores" he said, "Why?" the voice responded.

"I just had a bad feeling ok... just... keep an eye out, something feels off" he hangs up the phone and tries to return to his slumber, he reaches up to his heavily scarred neck and aimlessly scratches it... memories of that day still haunt him and now that same feeling of dread has returned... but somehow... it feels worse.