Alright, I actually already know what I have to do next. Create long term, self sustaining life. And I have alot of ideas I can try out. First off I need to expand my cavern and make sure it actually has supports, I also need to lace the ground with nutrients by converting it into dirt. Luckily I have a little blotch of dirt sitting on my pearly core, that I promptly absorbed.
>>Gained knowledge of: Fertile Dirt<<
I would be grinning if I had a face. If it was nutrient poor I would have some problems, maybe even have to make a cactus or two, but with this I should be fine. Now then, to wear away at these walls that imprison me! Gathering my mana I pushed it into the stone walls- away from mossy of course- and then began absorbing it. Why am I absorbing it even though it takes longer? Mana, duh. From what I can tell I’m going to need alot, creating mossy alone took a fair amount, about 2000 to be exact.
And now it is just the repetitive process of digging out a large chunk of space for my room, and chucking will-filled mana at the walls gets boring after a little bit. Luckily it seems my patience had improved by leaps and bounds after becoming a dungeon, otherwise I probably would have never made it very far. Luckily for me it doesn’t seem I have a cap on my mana, which the current figure is residing at around 200k, though I wonder if my core will ever get bigger? I really hope my assets don’t remain puny in this world… *cough* anyway~
After a few hours of labor- not birth- I finally carved out a decent ten meter diameter cylinder with rounded edges at the top and bottom. Also, I just realized I can actually see down here without light, colors and everything. And I can see light too, coming from the tiny hole above my core, giving everything… something. Speaking of which the grimoire never mentions what type of things I can absorb, so without further ado I promptly ate up the meager light shining down on me.
>>Gained knowledge of: Sunlight<<
I smirked and moved my attention to the roof of my cylinder room and planted a big fat stone in the ceiling, of course this stone was made so it absorbs excess mana and releases sunlight, instantly brightening up the dreary stone room. Excitedly I started converting the ground into fertile dirt. I’m going to have to create an ecosystem, so I’ll have to figure out how to make a rain cycle as well as wind so the air doesn’t stale. Not that it’d be hard to do, just slightly complicated.
But for now that doesn’t matter much, I just need to create plants and a few small animals for my room. Specifically I need to create animals that are intelligent and can burrow through stone. And no I’m not going with termites. I’m creating an entire new species for this task!
But first I got to make them food… Hmm, I pulled out a lump of mana and started bundling it up into a seed on the ground. How about a tree? A tree whose roots could burrow through stone and suck the mana from the ground. Oh, and also break that stone down into dirt, while forming pockets of metal it absorbs in its trunk. A tree whose vibrant red-orange leaves, reminiscent of fall, could suck up the light of the air, flower and bloom into sweet, nutritious fruits. Whose pale brown trunks repaired damage quickly, were flexible but sturdy, and produced a sweet honey from within them.
>>You have created a new lifeform. Automatically named Autur Honber Tre<<
Again with the naming of my own creations! I complained, Do you gods not have any faith in my own naming sense!? I wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t, but it’s still hurtful. Anyway, checking my pool I found that the tree used 89000 mana, and 70 animus, leaving me with just ten of the latter. Making just the moss used twenty so I doubt I have enough for grass. Much less a pollinator for my trees.
I sighed in annoyance and decided to just work on creating a structured layout of my future dungeon for the next few hours. Let’s see, how do I want this floor to turn out? Usually dungeons are labyrinths or something similar, caves for example. However I remember a few dungeons actually being forests and canyons in certain games, the so called open-dungeons.
Unfortunately I am a bit far underground for a complete ‘open’ dungeon. Yet anyway.
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However I do have an idea of what I want to do-
-Make a city!
I mean why not? I’ll fill it with boulevards and houses, forests and parks, maybe even add a gladiator arena! And I’ll have different districts be filled with their own sets of monsters, maybe even add a forge district with dragons!
I’ll add my own custom humanoids, each with a different purpose and abilities. I’ll add animals those people will keep as pets, mounts, or something else inbetween. I’ll create giant buildings of all architectural styles! Organic! Metallic! Futuristic! Rustic! Nothing can stop me, Bwahahahaha!
*cough* anyway, I quickly began carving a giant circle with my core as a point along the circumference. I don’t plan it to be the full size of the city because I will expand, but it is more of a test to see how far I can control my mana away from my core, the distance to the surface is a good ten kilometers or so , and didn’t seem that hard to do. However you can never be too sure… (That is a lie. Yes you can. Especially when you’re wrong.)
Luckily it seems my range is much farther than I anticipated. The circle I made has a diameter of about fifteen kilometers, maybe a bit too much for my starting point, but I’m sticking with it. That range however didn’t even strain me, which I find surprising. At the farthest point it felt just like I was messing around near my core, though it took a long time for the mana I transmuted to get back to me.
Well no matter, grabbing onto the ring of mana I had created I slowly started constricting it to hollow out a giant stone cavity. Of course the little moss and tree I created earlier were tangent to this, so they wouldn’t get destroyed by it.
Then I started the agonizingly slow process of clearing out, which took me who knows how long. If my moss is anything to go by then I have been working on it for days. Speaking of my moss it has managed to hollow out a rough sphere-like glob of stone four meters in diameter, and checking my status I found my animus has gone up again from the constant growth and death of it. My tree on the otherhand has grown rather well, reaching four meters into the air, I should probably make the ceiling larger than six meters… Well that’s not a problem at the moment. It was also leaking small amounts of honey, so that’s a plus.
However I continued to focus on the main room for my city, and arbitrarily decided to make the room a giant dome with the height of three kilometers, which hopefully will be enough for what I am planning. I wonder if I can make a false sky… I shook myself out of my thoughts and accelerated the absorption rate of the stone.
Still, it took me a while to actually clear out the dome, and when I finally moved my attention away from it I shuddered on seeing the growth of my moss, it practically took over a good square kilometer of stone, not even counting horizontally. Guess I better harvest that… Also what the hell is with the lack of non-patience!? I didn’t even notice how much time went by! While I experienced similar focus when designing a creature’s DNA from the ground up, at least then I had a rough estimate of progress and the time that went by. This time I didn’t even notice how much I progressed until I completely absorbed the entire area. I shuddered, is this what a construction AI feels like? I watched a talk on the mindsets of AI’s once and how primitive ones do not notice progress, only the beginning and end.
Creepy thoughts aside I pondered how to go about clearing my field of rapidly growing moss. If I left this thing to grow would it consume the entire undercrust of the world? Absently pondering the end of the world I tried to just absorb the moss back into me, and with a sickening crunch all the moss turned to mana and streamed into my tiny-
Oh, not so tiny anymore core. I appear to have grown to a diameter of ten centimeters. Wonder if that is any good? Curiously I opened up my status.
~| Dungeon Stats |~
Diversity Rank: 1
Danger Rank: 1
Mana: 13,406,998
Animus: 538,412
Rooms: 3
Levels: 1
Monsters: 0
Bosses: 0
~| Dungeon Information |~
Dungeon name: ---
Dungeon title: ---
Nodes- Honey, Fruit, Wood
Entities- Trees(1)
↓ Expand Grimoire ↓
O~kay~ Lots and lots of mana. My animus is also much higher than before, probably enough to actually make a creature! Though I should wait on that till I have a suitable ecosystem… Well, might as well get started with building the city.