[To Dust] flickered into my interface and I dismissed it to focus on other tasks. I would investigate the stone golems later, but for now, I had four extra minion slots to fill.
To appease the Captain, I would fashion my second floor as a training ground for new recruits. The Captain had seemed interested in something of that nature and the task shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish with the resources at my disposal.
Using stone spikes as rudimentary tools, I created five clearings set on the outskirts of my domain. The uprooted trees were gently relocated to a different area of the forest and I made sure each one had a dedicated Treant to care for it as it recovered. I shifted a level six Treant into the center of each clearing and fused their roots to a boulder underneath the dirt. That way, the minion would be stationary and their natural camouflage would be obvious due to the lack of neighboring trees.
Monstrous Generosity would ensure that the Treants would respawn and be low-ish level for the Captain’s recruits, but there should be a greater challenge here than stationary Treants. Deeper into my domain I selected three more Treants and anchored them to a small radius using my cilia rope. The inflexible but incorporeal nature of the material meant that the Treants could move however they wanted without any risk of getting tangled but would be restricted from straying too far from their designated territory. These Treants I made sure were of higher level. I collected some of the level ten variants I had laying around and summoned a level eleven version just to spice things up.
That should cover the intermediate challenge of fighting a Treant when it had the advantage of movement and using its stealth, but as was tradition I needed one last challenge to cap the training grounds off with. In the closest part of the forest to my cave, I split my remaining six Treants into two groups of three and leashed them in overlapping areas. This way, there would be two areas with three Treant guardians that would work together to impede invaders. I took extra care to have them all at max level. Especially since this was also where my grove of enhanced trees was slowly recovering.
To top it all off, I disseminated some of my collection of random items that had been gathering dust in my core room in twelve different chests spread throughout the forest. I numbered each chest using tick marks, but in a moment of giddy inspiration, I labeled the twelfth chest with thirteen marks just to mess with them.
Altogether, that should create a scaling system where new recruits could first fight a singular stationary Treant, then stronger mobile variants, then lastly an organized group while getting marginally rewarded for their troubles. There also should be enough individual encounters to support a fairly large group of trainees concurrently. At least that was my hope.
Of course, doing all this drastically weakened my defense, but to compensate I beefed up the defenses in my cave. I had much success with placing a Nothic in the ceiling the first time around, but the maze was too large to make this strategy effective. That was if I placed an unmodified Nothic in the ceiling. There was no reason why I couldn’t create a super organism traversing the entire length of the maze with eyes that would slowly degrade the life pool of any adventurer foolhardy enough to entire my private sanctum.
Giggling at the thought of creating my own eldritch horror, I set about the task.
It would be a long-term project, as I needed many eyes, so for now I would simply create the base creature. I extended the height of the ceiling on all the floors of my maze and dug a tunnel that ran parallel to the main passageways. Then I summoned a level eleven Nothic and slowly began expanding it. Every dozen paces I constructed an additional heart, but as my new creature would never need to move — and therefore didn’t need muscles — the process went by fairly quickly.
I broke a hole for the Nothic’s eye to gaze through. It would be vulnerable if it was ever found, so I created a stone eyelid — nearly six inches thick and reinforced with a woven mesh of cilia — for my abomination. I then attached the Nothic’s eyelid muscles to the stone version and enhanced them until they could snap the mechanism shut in an instant.
And I was done!
I now had a reasonably well-hidden and well-protected Nothic that spanned the entire length of my maze. Because of its massive size, at least part of it was always ‘nearby’ a Totem of the Roller Turtle, which increased its defense significantly. All I needed to do now, was collect Nothic eyes and add them to my new guardian and perhaps attune said eyes to various elements to give it more of a punch.
To set about that task I painlessly culled four of my Nothic, but stopped when something strange happened. Instead of keeling over like they usually did, each Nothic froze as a wave of sandy beige washed over it. A second later, each Nothic statue shuddered — dropping sandy dust to the ground — and lay into each other in abandon.
Each golem crumbled into small piles of dust after barely a minute as I watched in bemusement. First of all, the supposed stone golems were more like sand or dust golems. Second, when the system described them as hostile, they were hostile to everything, including my minions and themselves.
Lastly, the buggers had stolen my eyeballs!
Grumbling in irritation, I found another Nothic and ripped out its eye as fast as I could and sighed in relief when the body turned to stone but the eye in my grip did not. To Dust didn’t brick my plan, but it made it slightly more annoying to collect the eyes. Either way, in time Monstrous Generosity would fuel my ever-growing need for eyeballs and my first floor would gain another worthy guardian.
Satisfied I hadn’t gimped myself by appealing to the Captain, I addressed the second problem case.
Miranda was excited to find a method of breaking the tier boundary without having to destroy a dungeon. A method I could and was doing on the trees in my domain. The issue was. I really didn't want to do it on people. The success rate was abysmal, and even with a human’s larger soul, I wasn’t confident I could increase it humanely. What happened with Gella was a fluke borne from desire which abused the intent-based System to pull off a miracle. I doubted I could muster up such conviction for a random person who wasn’t in imminent danger and was half convinced this — and not the size of the trees’ souls — was the reason for my high failure rate with the trees. I simply wasn’t desperate enough to push enough emotion and intent into the craft.
I really didn’t want to kill anyone in what essentially amounted to cosmetic surgery. Plastic surgery was fine, and even encouraged in some situations back on earth, but if plastic surgery had even a one percent mortality rate, it would have been banned. Let alone a greater than ninety percent mortality rate. Trees, on the other hand, were different. I was okay sacrificing ten to elevate one, but if I had to do that for people I don’t think I would be able to sleep at night.
Hmm...I don’t sleep anymore, do I.
Regardless, I wasn’t willing to use the Dagger on people and I had to communicate that to the excitable old matron in some way or another. Direct communication didn’t work, primarily because I didn’t speak the local language, and I hadn’t received some upgrade to allow for telepathy of some sort. That didn’t mean that I couldn’t communicate though. Everyone understood pictures, and I was confident that I could convey my reluctance through a mural of sorts.
Perhaps I could set it into my cliff face?
I set about the task with a level of enthusiasm that shocked me. It had been a while since I had created something artistic as all my recent projects had been mechanical or simple maintenance. Stone molded like putty under my expertise as I expanded the mural until it took up the entire side of the cliff face.
I channeled my emotions into the construction, first the anger and disgust of the needless suffering caused by the Dagger and its twisted ways. Then the insecurity I felt at wielding so much power over another, and the fear of not knowing what I was doing wrong that was killing the trees. Sometime through the process, a sense of melancholy settled over me. I recounted in stone the sorrowful turn of events that led to the acquisition of the Dagger, and the project changed. It wasn’t so much a form of communication with Miranda, but an outlet for the pent-up emotions that I had built over the times since my awakening.
At long last, the dawn’s rays bathed my cliffside and I retreated to admire my handiwork.
< You cannot craft Artifacts >
I dismissed the notification with an indifferent shrug. Artifact or not, the mural was beautiful.
----------------------------------------
In due time, the Guards entered my domain. They split into two groups, one led by the captain, and the other by Miranda. The captain was initially shocked at the change that had occurred overnight, but a small grin blossomed on his face as the day progressed and he rotated his squad members between the different groves. At first, they tackled each challenge as a full team, but as they gained confidence they allowed only select members to challenge the Treants while the rest watched.
I was amused at the Captain's caution, as despite his apparent enthusiasm, he didn't direct his squad further in. Miranda on the other hand, had no such inhibitions. She and her squad torched their way to my cave entrance with none of the careful consideration present in the captain’s demeanor.
She was honestly annoying me, that arrogant matron mage. Her liberal use of fire in my forest filled the air with smoke and killed many of the trees which I was growing rather fond of. So when she and her group approached my mural and froze, I fluttered my cilia in smug satisfaction. She immediately set out to study and interpret the mural, all while spouting a constant stream of sycophantic honorifics that I tuned out after a minute.
I grew bored. My outer domain was inaccessible due to the human’s presence, and my internal cave system was mostly locked up as well since Miranda refused to leave my entrance. I spent some time working on my Ceiling Horror but the frustration of having limited control over my cilia dampened my enthusiasm. In time, though, I turned my attention to my copse of enhanced trees.
There had been minute changes since I had upgraded them. Without my enhanced perception I would never have noticed, but their leaves had darkened, gaining a viridian luster that seemed to draw in the eye with its beauty. When focusing on their bark, I could tell it had thickened, but also acquired an increase in hardness that I had a difficult time quantifying. It was as if some invisible force was gluing the molecular bonds in the bark together in addition to the natural resiliency of the molecules.
I was deeply intrigued, as it appeared that tiering up did not just enhance the soul. Or, considering the only thing I had encountered that I couldn’t perceive was the soul, it was possible that a more powerful soul enhanced the physical vessel through an unknown mechanism.
There were issues, however. The dirt beneath the trees had grown dry and crumbly, while some of the beautiful leaves had acquired yellow patches and their tips had blackened and withered. I knew approximately nothing about plants, but the changes reminded me starkly of the few times I had gotten plants for my college dorm, only to see them wither in the same way over the weeks and months. I had hoped that the Treants would have helped me care for the plants, but apparently, they could only top off the trees’ life pools and little more.
I was determined to keep them alive, so I scoured my limited experience for something that I could do. As far as I knew. Plants required three things to grow. Water, nutrients, and sunlight.
The first was easy as I already had access to the water table. A quick effort of will later, and the lower roots of the enhanced trees were suffused in water. I couldn’t go higher due to the humans, but the trees didn’t seem to mind. They drained the small reservoir I brought up in seconds — as if they were dehydrated to the extreme — and I obliged by bringing up more.
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That caused the nearby Treant to grumble into life and heal the trees which pushed back the black withering at the ends of their leaves. I rippled in joy, which caused Miranda to freak out for a solid fifteen minutes, but I ignored her and focused back on my babies.
Nutrients weren’t something I understood. Potentially I could crumble up rock and sprinkle it over the soil in the hopes that I would release something good for the trees, but it sounded and felt like a long shot. Plus, I didn't have enough control right now to achieve something of that nature. I would have to think on the matter.
Sunlight was another thing that I didn’t have much control over. Or did I?
What was that article on geoengineering I read way back then? Something about dumping a bunch of chemicals — was it sulfates? — into the upper atmosphere to combat global warming. Wait, that was the opposite of what I wanted. I wanted more sunlight, stronger sunlight. So instead of adding particulates to the upper atmosphere, perhaps I could remove the cloud cover?
Hmm, that didn’t seem enough to me. Assuming the pattern held. Enhanced trees needed an order of magnitude more water, so it made sense that they would need an order of magnitude more light. Simply removing clouds didn’t seem nearly sufficient especially since I knew that most clouds didn’t necessarily reduce the amount of light by that much. Rather, they refracted the light in a way that made it appear diffuse. That was the reason why it was still possible to get sunburned on a cloudy day.
No, what I needed was a more extreme solution. I recalled the amazing solar energy plant built in the northern Sahara desert a couple of years ago, and how they had used gigantic parabolic mirrors to focus the light on a tower full of molten salt. The heat was then used to spin a turbine and produce vast quantities of electricity. So to replicate the solar power plant, I needed to build many mirrors and have them focus their light on my enhanced trees and see if that improved the situation.
I had stone, and a quick application of force and friction created a foggy glass that I had to manually pick out the impurities. Even after painstaking focus, I was still left with a shoddy product, but it should work well enough for an initial test.
I buzzed impatiently for the humans to leave so that I could place my mirror beside my trees but then froze. I wasn’t thinking big enough. On earth, the engineers who had built the revolutionary solar plant had placed the mirrors on ground level because that worked and other solutions were infeasibly expensive. As a dungeon, I had no such limitations.
Giddy with glee, I expanded a single cilia up from the top of my mountain. It rose through the air, first a dozen feet, then as the day progressed, hundreds. Soon enough the temperature around my cilia dropped, and I could sense clouds tickling at my extremities. Excited, I continued. Pushing harder and farther until my domain burst past the clouds and into the brilliant expanse of the sky.
I could see nothing. It was not like an airplane where the vast swathe of sky shocked you with wonderment. I couldn’t see the vast vista below, nor the clouds or the sun. It rankled that the stars were so close, yet so far away, and yet I could feel the sky in the way only a dungeon could. The frigid temperatures tickled me, as winds failed to move my stationary extension to the sky. One day I would make a method to see the stars, but for now, I had achieved my goal.
With exacting precision, I ferried a single bead of foggy glass up my sky elevator and anchored it to the end. The bead melted under my direct attention and formed into a faceted lens that focused all the light that struck it down onto my little grove of enhanced trees.
Without my perfect perception, such a feat would have been impossible. But with it, I could detect and fine-tune the magnifying glass until a tiny spot of light focused perfectly on a single leaf.
The amount of focused light was minuscule in the grand scheme of things, so I began the long process of ferrying more glass up into the upper atmosphere and forming them into lenses to focus and enhance the light shining on my trees. By the time I had a thousand beads, I estimated that the light around my trees had increased by five percent. As noon rolled around and passed by, I managed to maintain enough light to simulate high noon with over ten thousand little beads.
Slowly. Ever so slowly, the patches of yellow on the magnificent viridian leaves retreated, and the leaves grew an even darker shade of green.
As I continued the process of refining glass and bringing it up into the sky, a notification pinged.
< Mana 1,657/1,657 >
< You have leveled up! >
< You are now level 12! >
< Mana 0/1,990 >
I continued working as I diverted some of my attention to my upgrade options.
Attune your second floor to the Eternal Spring:
Eternal Spring grants 50 life regeneration per minute to minion and non-minion plants
Eternal Spring grants 1 experience per minute to minion and non-minion plants at full life which are below your level
Attune your second floor to the Fetid Swamp
Fetid Swamp imparts -8% to maximum resistance to non-minions
Fetid Swamp periodically uses [Tentacle of the Deep] on hostile non-minions
Fetid Swamp floods the floor
Attune your second floor to the Solar Convergence
Solar Convergence grants minions +5% to maximum fire resistance
Solar Convergence grants minion and non-minion plants +45% to fire resistance
Solar convergence grants minions +25% of physical damage as extra fire damage
Well, well, well. Another biome effect. The previous biome effect had been the Deep Dark which had rounded out my original floor. This time I had three potential options with vastly different effects.
The Eternal Spring would heal every plant on my second floor which I assumed included the random weeds and flowers in addition to my Treants. It also had the interesting line of granting one experience point per minute to all plants below my level. Experience was a concept I was familiar with on a general level, but not in this world.
Depending on how much experience it took to level up this upgrade could be worthless, or it could be amazing. I had to assume that experience points scaled in a similar way to how my mana requirements did. That implied that Eternal Spring would naturally boost the base level of every plant in my domain by a couple of levels, but would peter off in utility once the experience requirements ballooned exponentially.
In essence that granted me time. In a few levels, I knew my forest would die and be replaced by a few highly cultivated high-level trees that could survive my presence. There was no getting around that fact. Whether it happened when I hit tier three, or when I hit tier four was irrelevant. My very presence was sapping the trees of their much-needed vitality and even if I didn’t directly kill them, they would eventually die from collateral damage from roving adventurers. My Treants would do their best, but they were only delaying the inevitable. Eternal Spring, though, offered an alternative. By granting experience to every plant on my second floor, I would both get to keep my forest and gain more mana from the forest until a figured out a better — non-harmful — way of taking mana from low-leveled souls.
The real question I had was, what was the normal way plant life gained experience? Humans gained levels from fighting, but I found it unlikely that trees were similar, as that would mean that they might never level up. It was possible that this world heavily favored animals, but I preferred to believe it was equal until proven otherwise. That meant that trees could gain experience through some method.
A dozen ideas ran through my head. Perhaps if an animal died nearby they gained experience, or perhaps they gained experience from growing tall or from the quantity of water that evaporated from their leaves. It could be anything, even the amount of photosynthesis they did. I had no clues, which meant I had to experiment to find it out as it didn’t help me to have trees with a max level of fifty, but a level of one.
The second option, Fetid Swamp, was much more offensive. I wasn’t averse to flooding the floor, as I was sure my enhanced trees would enjoy that, but the real power behind the upgrade was in its reduction to maximum resistance. The math was a tad confusing, but assuming an adventurer had 75% maximum resistance, Fetid Swamp would drop them down to 67% resistance. That equated to a shocking increase in damage. At 75% resistance, an adventurer could sustain four damage for every point of life, while at 67% they could only do slightly more than three damage per point of life. That was a nearly thirty percent boost in damage. It was a massive increase that would only get bigger if adventurers had more than 75% resistance.
For example, if an adventurer somehow achieved 90% resistance, then Fetid Swamp would reduce their resistance to 82% which would reduce their effective life pool by nearly half. When I scratched out the math on my cave wall I came out that it would increase damage by a whopping 80%. Of course, the effect was reduced at less than 75% resistance and would do nothing if an adventurer had less than 67% resistance, but I was more worried about the insanely well-equipped adventurers who wanted to kill me.
The [Tentacles of the Deep] were just a bonus. One that I had no information about, as the skill didn’t appear in the bestiary left to me by Martin. Even if that aspect of the upgrade was useless, Fetid Swamp’s other effect would ensure that my low-damage Treants would always deal formidable damage.
Lastly, there was Solar Convergence. I couldn’t help but think that the upgrade was because I messed with lens and light earlier in the day, but I supposed it didn’t matter. The biome effect would completely counter the primary weakness of my Treants and even protect the rest of my forest from fire-based attacks. It also provided some damage, which in essence put it as the middle-of-the-road option among the three upgrade paths.
I had no way of checking the stats of a random fern, but I felt it was safe to assume that it had no resistances or even less against fire. The additional resistances granted by Solar Convergence would make it damn near impossible to burn my forest down. It also had a theoretical benefit when I ramped up my sun collection initiative. In just the same way that a magnifying glass could burn a leaf, I ran the risk of doing more harm than help. Solar Convergence would increase the margin of error for that, and might even allow me to supercharge my trees by blasting them with sunlight.
My thoughts spun with possibilities as I continued maintaining my growing dungeon.
----------------------------------------
Captain Arcturus sank down on a fallen log in a daze. Today had been a whole different level of unbelievable. This had all begun as a routine mission to assess and potentially cull a dungeon that had spawned too close to city limits. But every day something else ridiculous happened that completely changed the situation.
“Are you quite alright, dear?” Miranda settled down beside him. “You are looking rather unwell.”
“I’m fine, just. In shock I suppose,” he replied, pulling off his helmet and placing it on the ground. Another insane action — removing a piece of gear in a dungeon — he had no reservation about after the day he had. “This dungeon is not at all what I expected. It’s...I don’t know if it is doing it intentionally or not, but this forest is the perfect training ground. It's got low-level monsters that don’t move for crying out loud. There are progressive encounters as we approach the cave, and...”
Arcturus trailed off, rubbing his face for what felt like the thousandth time since he had woken this morning.
“This dungeon is special indeed, but are the monsters here so amazing?”
“They really are,” Arcturus said with a sigh. “Dungeons defy logic and our men are sorely lacking experience. We can train discipline, but the real training we need carries with it such a risk that it is viewed as not worth it by most. Here though, the risk for death is so low that...I broke protocol and sent my squad out ahead to just kill as many of the low leveled Treants as possible.”
“That’s wonderful, dear.”
“How was your communion with the dungeon?” Arcturus said. “Did you succeed in figuring out how your daughter surpassed her tier? What did the dungeon flows say?”
“Mhmm, the dungeon is special indeed,” Miranda slowly said. She arranged her clothes artfully as if thinking carefully of what to say next. “It created a great memorial at the entrance of its cave. It is a wonder to behold, do make the trek over there when you get the chance. You will not find a more heartstopping creation in a hundred miles.”
“Is it so great?” Arcturus raised a brow at the elderly woman's demeanor.
“Indeed, it is almost alive in its sadness, and it explains much of what happened to my daughter.”
“So your communion was a success then?”
“No,” Miranda shook her head. “The dungeon will not look at me. It does not respond to any of my words and seems deadly focused on the sky as if it can’t bear to even look at me. I believe that the next step to gaining its attention is approaching the core and forming my appeal there.”
“Negative,” Arcturus shook his head. “I can’t allow you to do that and risk angering it. What we have here is too good to risk on a chance.”
“I don’t think you appreciate how important it is to find a method of breaking the level cap.”
“And I don’t think you appreciate how little carryover there is between training against a person and fighting a twelve-foot tall living tree with six branches that independently move,” Arcturus stood with a creak of strained leather on steel. “A tree that turns to stone to fight again once it dies for no apparent reason. Terrain that turns on you at the drop of a hat. Dungeons are plentiful and if we strengthen our soldiers we will be able to set out and clear other dungeons without losing any casualties.”
“Little Theo, do not assume to know how little or much I understand the gravity of the find you have stumbled upon. Do not presume that our acquaintance precludes you from heeding my wisdom. Violence begets violence, and as long as we as a species are forced to consume Dungeon Seeds, we will forever be trapped in a cycle that kills your precious recruits.”
“I’m sorry, Miranda. You will have to get permission from command if you wish to commune with the Dungeon Core directly. As long as my men can train safely here, I will not allow anyone to jeopardize this peace.”