The Wind Sylph tore through the sky, fighting with all its might to break the air as it had seen before in its memories. Waves of mana sloughed off of it. A price to be paid, for equal trade. Speed accrued in its vaporous form, pushing aside the air into violent vortex eddies. It laughed, a tinkling emanation of effortless joy that sounded like wind chimes on a stormy night.
Then, there was silence.
Its mana fizzled and the Sylph slowed. The air dragged on its gossamer body like tortuous hooks as the chains of Earth dragged it down. It sighed, all joy gone as it lazily twisted in the upper atmosphere. For but a brief moment it had returned to a different time. A better time when the earth sang and the wind howled in joy at being alive.
With dead eyes, the Sylph scanned the land beneath, passed over the boring human city, and wistfully settled on the great lake and the great potential hidden beneath the dark waters. Such a shame. To sleep when you could play.
It floated, and time passed.
A ripple of intent washed over it and it turned its attention to the east. Something was there. Something weak, but...whimsical? It played with the wind, making it dance and twirl in elegant spirals. The dance was slow, painfully so, but move it did.
The Wind Sylph caressed the wind and touched upon the intent of the little one. It giggled, breaking into a joyful spin as it felt beautiful destruction oozing out of the child.
How strange. How wonderful.
----------------------------------------
I stretched, reveling in the rustling of leaves and branches alike that the movement elicited. Without my input or the wind's restless blowing, my forest was as silent as the grave. No critters or creatures scurried up the branches or feasted on the undergrowth. How could they when my stifling presence drained their modest souls from their will to live? If any sound arose, it came from my stealthy Treants as they lumbered through the forest and cared for any frail or sickly trees they came across.
If I was still back on earth, the lack of diversity would have bothered me. With no bees to pollinate the flowers or squirrels to bury nuts, the forest would surely wither as the years crawled along. Here, however, the air pulsed with the magic of [Eternal Spring]; a magical skill that fed every plant on my second floor with vitality and experience to spare.
“Hey, mama?”
I turned my vast attention onto my little one. Betsy floated in front of a great spyglass I had installed in her chambers. Her great central eye stared unblinking through the glass at the small colony of humans parked on my periphery as her other eyestalks tried in vain to catch a glimpse.
Yes, dear?
I pulsed mana to her in a telepathic message. It was perhaps a waste to burn mana on such a frivolous interaction, but Betsy was my first and most loved of my bosses. I never worried about wasting mana to speak to her.
“How come it's ok to kill certain humans but not others?”
Ahh. She was referring to the incident several days ago when I had elevated Gella and Kellar as my champions against the meddling deity Deia. The two spunky humans had pledged their loyalty to me and I had reciprocated by elevating their souls to the fifth tier.
The laws of conservation existed in this world — however, twisted they were — so I had to source souls to empower the humans. Instead of looking to my forest of high-tier trees, I had instead opted to use the priests living among the human settlement. As far as I was concerned they were right bastards and I wasn’t comfortable with having enemy troops so close to my domain. And so, what had followed was a stealth operation where my Eyelit Effigies stealthed into the human camp — burning mana to survive outside of my domain — and neutralized the zealots with the power of the Dagger of Geas; my first artifact.
Well, dear.
I scratched Betsy between her eyestalks as I thought about the answer. She purred in delight, though didn’t take her eye off the spyglass.
We must always try to do good and solve problems peacefully, but sometimes we come across creatures who oppose us unilaterally.
“Does that mean they are evil?” Three of Betsy’s eyestalks gawped at my crystal core, while the rest continued to look into the spyglass.
Few things are truly evil, especially not those that oppose us. Most creatures are somewhere in between and struggle every day with their choices. It is each of our jobs to be sincere and find a peaceful solution within the limitations set upon us.
“I don’t get it...”
I squeezed the little beholder in delight and she squirmed as my tendrils pulled her from her spyglass.
Sometimes we are not smart enough to find a peaceful solution but remember dear: Friendship is optimal. Can you do that for me?
“Yes! I made friends with Cortana and all the Nothic and everyone I’ve met!”
I patted her head, and let her return to her people-watching as I zoomed my perception out. It was a beautiful day with brilliant blue skies looking down upon a grand viridian forest. Somehow, it felt all the more amazing knowing that it was my presence which created the scene.
A niggling notification tickled my attention, and I pulled up my interface to see that several of my skills had come off cooldown.
Dungeon Core
Consumable Artifact
Changes maximum level to 35
Level: 22 (29)
Mana: 7,590/9,919
Upgrades pending: 0
Floor 1 Upgrades: Summon Nothic, Create Shadow Source, Wily Intellect, Deep Dark, Soulbind Artifact, Summon Totem of the Roller Turtle, Monstrous Generosity
Floor 2 Upgrades: Summon Treant, Unstable Fusion, To Dust, Eternal Spring, Starbound Stabilization, Eldritch Intelligence, Refine Transparent Alumina Ampoule
Floor 3 Upgrades: Summon Artifice Hulk, Tears of Gold, Fractured Augmentation, Hyperbolic Menagerie, Corrupted Transference, Exalted Minions, Create Recovery Source
Floor 4 Upgrades: None
Creatures:
Floor 1: 22/22
Floor 2: 22/22
Floor 3: 22/22
Floor 4: 0/22
There was one other skill I possessed that didn’t appear on the interface. [Chaos Untold] a hidden skill that had been granted to me by a mysterious entity following my most recent crisis. It provided an alternative leveling method other than collecting mana and was the primary reason I was so confident in challenging an old god such as Deia.
Besides that, my upgrade list was long, but right now only a few of the skills interested me. [Create Shadow Source] and [Refine Transparent Alumina Ampoule] were both off cooldown and I triggered them to add to my growing collection. The third skill was new. [Create Recovery Source] was my newest addition and the one I understood the least.
The sphere that the skill produced was identical to a Shadow Source except that it was milky white instead of black. It oozed an off-white liquid that had what appeared to be zero viscosity. The stuff was slick as grease and vanished down cracks like nothing I had ever seen before. To add to that, the stuff had an annoying habit of evaporating so I had to resort to storing it in a perfect box with no seams.
The evaporating issue had prevented me from experimenting with the stuff and I was waiting just a little longer for it to build up before I sank my teeth in. The extra source would speed things up, and I estimated that I would have enough for some serious crafting by the end of the day.
For now, I would focus on the war effort.
I wasn’t some war genius, or even at all qualified to go to war in the first place. Unless you counted exam week or the brief kerfuffle with Rockwood, I had never gone to war against anything. That wasn’t to say I was clueless. I had a solid understanding of my — and therefore my minions' — capabilities and I had played enough games and read enough books about war to know the basics.
As far as I understood it, there were innumerable strategies with an uncountable number of counters to said strategies. However, there was a reason why raiding in RTS games was so effective. At its most basic, war was about resources. Production and distribution. If you were able to disrupt either, then the win was in the bag.
Now, basing my entire strategy on a video game from the 90s didn’t seem like the greatest plan, but the logic checked out in my head. Supply lines were king. Especially since I could manufacture the perfect creature counter to whatever is thrown at me with enough time and creativity.
Step one. Solidify my supply lines.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
As a dungeon, I didn’t need the traditional food, water, and shelter, but I did need a steady influx of mana. If the flow stopped, then I would fall into hibernation for a reason I had yet to explore. That meant that I needed to make sure that my trees — and the humans I supposed — continued to survive and thrive in my domain.
Trees were easy. I had solved the sunlight issue with my solar array previously, and water wasn’t an issue since a river passed through my domain. I could also bring up water from the water table in a pinch if things got dicey. The key to winning was redundancy, however, so over the coming days it would be nice if I expanded northwards to subsume the source of the river so that it couldn’t ever be blocked or poisoned.
Satisfying the humans was a little more tricky. Neither food nor water would be difficult to provide for them as they already collected water from the river, and had plans on farming my second floor. If I set up my forest to favor fruit-bearing trees and edible roots then I should be able to support...boy. Hundreds of people per acre, at least. More if I could figure out a way to abuse the regeneration granted by [Eternal Spring] to work on the edible portion of the plant.
The bigger issue was that they refused to enter my domain for long periods. This restricted how much farming they were willing and capable of doing, but more importantly reduced my mana generation. I wouldn’t be able to convince them to stay for long periods unless I stopped soul-draining them. There was also the issue of the roaming monsters, but that was a lesser issue.
Thing was, I had been given a clue on how to solve the soul-draining problem. If I rewound to my very first day here and my revelation on manergic induction, I knew that my mana production followed many of the same laws as electromagnetic induction. That meant I had three ways of reducing the strain on fragile human souls. One, I could increase the distance between them and my cilia. An infeasible solution as the whole point was that they were inside of me. Two, I could reduce the speed that the humans moved relative to my cilia. Possible if I submerged the population or perhaps reduced the oxygen concentration so they felt sleepy all the time, but a nasty solution all told. Third, and lastly, I could reduce the size of my cilia.
Lucky for me, I knew that reducing the size of my cilia was possible. I had been offered an ability not too long ago that allowed my cilia to split. [Nihilic’s Bifurcation] had unfortunately gotten corrupted, but its presence gave me confidence that what I was about to attempt was not only possible but viable.
With deft motions, I formed a razor from cilia. The material melted into the shape I desired in seconds, the process made trivial from extensive familiarity. I spent a few extra moments sharpening the edge, then — with some dithering — I sliced a fresh strand lengthwise on the blade.
It stung, propagating a shiver up the entire strand and I felt both strands begin to wither. I clamped down with my will, pushing mana into both and willing them to stabilize. Minutes passed as I examined the give and take. How much mana I could feed the dying strands for them to start healing, and how long they would survive before they withered completely. It was an educational few minutes, and by the end, I was left with two healthy cilia precisely half the thickness of a standard strand.
I hereby dub thee: Tier 4 cilia.
I could already feel the limitation of the bifurcation. My sense of awareness was weakened and I couldn’t move them as fluidly as my natural tier 5 cilia. It was almost like scar tissue, though I wasn’t sure if that was because of the recency of the surgery or if I would never have my full faculties through the cut cilia.
Either way, it was time for some thorough testing for which I would need a testing environment and a few unsuspecting souls.
I extended several hundred meters into the sky to minimize the effect of my main body interfering with the experiment and manufactured several small areas containing cilia of every tier between one and five. When I tried to split tier 1 cilia, I came across a strange hurdle. Split tier 1 strands wouldn’t stabilize until I shoved enough mana into them to uptier back to tier 1. This made it effectively impossible to downtier any farther, but I wasn’t too bothered. This would serve as an initial test.
I also needed life to examine within my down tiered cilia. While I could perhaps convince Gella or Kellar to volunteer, I didn’t want to since they were both high tier. Besides they weren’t here in the first place. No, what I needed was life with the smallest possible soul. A baby sapling might work, but ideally, I should use an animal like a lizard or a fly. Something that would visibly show the effects of my cilia at the most minute level.
Since there were no critters in my domain, I asked my lovely Cortana to reach outside and grab me a few. She had no trouble doing so with her near omniscience and long branches, and soon I had a half dozen strange birds, lizards, and arthropods trapped in stone boxes floating in the sky. I thanked my lovely assistant and got back to work.
Predictably, the animals in the area containing normal tier-5 cilia went dormant immediately. They refused to move, and died as soon as I poked them with a rod; even the slightest motion was too much for their fragile souls. I found similar results in the tier-4 and tier-3 bifurcations to lesser degrees, but it was the tier-2 and tier-1 areas that stoked my interest.
The animals were less active, though they perked up once I allowed some light into the containers. Oops, but that was a great sign. It meant that my theory worked. Thinner cilia meant weaker cilia and therefore a reduced drain on the souls within. Predictably, however, the mana produced from the split cilia was abysmal. Less than 1% of what I would expect normally, but 1% was still better than the nothing I was currently getting from the humans who were outside of my domain.
Perfect results. It was time for some human studies.
The humans on my border moved among the trees and there were so many souls around that I would have no hope of expanding into that area manually. The last time I tried, I had used a complicated series of pneumatic artillery shells to pepper the forest with cilia. It was inefficient, created an uneven spread, and was slow to set up, but was the best solution I had at the time.
Since then, I had gained a few upgrades.
One thing that I never knew about higher dimensions was that distances were magnified. So much so, that if I shifted far enough in extradimensional space, I could expand into a region occupied by life. [Eldritch Intelligence] had expanded my horizons, and with but a thought I grew a few questing tendrils into the heart of the humans camp. There, I crafted a few bouquets of tier-1 cilia and attached them to rigid rods of cilia. Using my patent-pending method of push and pray, I shoved the buds of cilia into the three primary dimensions, and [Eternal Spring] took hold.
Ultra-vivid green grass burst through the muddy ground and flowers bloomed. I giggled as the humans panicked. The sourceless wind of my mirth only increased their terror and I couldn’t help but imagine each one as a headless chicken squawking to the sky. They would figure out that there was no danger, and that they could cultivate the land with my blessing.
I wasn’t done though. With my domain extending into the human camp, I had to prevent my minions from straying in and freaking people out. In the past, I had used ropes of cilia to prevent my creatures from straying where they didn’t belong. As a whitelist, it worked fine, however, I would need my minions to be unobstructed in the future.
I considered several possible solutions but eventually settled on one which was both simple and elegant. Around the human camp, I erected an extra-dimensional wall and simultaneously grew an extra-dimensional bulb on each of my Eyelit Effigies. The wall would be entirely transparent to any humans, but my Treants would be unable to pass since they couldn’t navigate higher dimensions as my bosses could. Cortana, Betsy, and Tank would be able to enter with ease as each one would easily be able to ‘walk around’ the wall.
I released all my Eyelit Effigies from their leashes as I was done playing babysitter for recruits. Then, I nudged one of the living trees towards the human camp and noted how it redirected along the edge of the wall. The humans naturally panicked and formed a shield wall in response, but over time they calmed when the Eyelit Effigy never crossed the barrier.
I watched the humans scurry for an hour or so, expanding beyond them and nudging my Effigies into defensive positions. Their aimless movements reminded me of ants as they got acquainted with the dungeon growing around them. They familiarized themselves with the borders and how any area that felt like a tier 1 dungeon was safe, while the tier 5 areas contained my minions. Many, of course, were scared of the change and moved to leave but that was to be expected. Most would stay and would realize in time just how nice it was that no natural beasts could enter and endanger their population.
I let my vision blur as I watched, rested, and thought.
< Mana 9,919/9,919 >
< You have leveled up! >
< You are now level 23! >
< Mana 0/11,521 >
Another level. My mana requirements were accelerating but were nowhere near the growth rate of my forest. I was still gaining a level every several days even with my exorbitant conversations with Betsy and my other experiments.
< Upgrades pending: 1 >
I flicked open the screen and read through my three new potential monsters.
Summon Ring Seraph:
Ring Seraphs require 2 minion slots
+3 to maximum creatures
1400 minute cooldown
Summon Dawn Wyrm Apostle:
You can only summon 7 Dawn Wyrm Apostles
Dawn Wyrm Apostles require 1/7th of your maximum minion count
Dawn Wyrm Apostles scale with creature count requirement
+4 to maximum creatures
800 minute cooldown
Summon Woodsinger:
Woodsingers require 0.25 minion slots
+5 to maximum creatures
50 minute cooldown
As I usually did, I brought out my monster manual and perused the options, only to be a touch disappointed. There didn’t seem to be any entries describing the first two options. Woodsinger had an entry but was disappointingly short.
Woodsinger:
Damage type(s): Unknown
Creature type(s): Spirit
Durability: F
Danger quotient: F
Special: Plant growth
Woodsingers are the embodiments of nature and vitality, using their eerie song to grow and shape plant life. As the most common of the four secondary spirits, Woodsingers are notoriously rare. No known dungeon has been recorded to spawn them, and can only be found naturally in exceptionally old forests or ancient ocean reefs.
Like the other elemental spirits, Woodsingers vanish when exposed to damage. They do not drop any resources upon death and have eluded all attempts at capture. They are also not dangerous to a common adventurer, with some legends purporting the benevolent spirits using their magic to heal injuries.
Recommended action: ignore.
Hmm. I chewed through the text as I considered. It appeared as if Woodsingers would be a purely peaceful minion. Not only that, I would assume that getting this option would engender me in the eyes of the locals. Not that I needed their goodwill, but having Woodsingers frolicking through my forest would definitely reduce the morale of any invaders. Unless they were heartless bastards, but in that case, I had other minions to deal with them.
Also, for some reason, when I looked at the option, I couldn’t help but think of elves. I didn’t know if they existed in this world, but if Woodsingers could do what the monster manual said they could, then the humans would be living in elaborate tree houses in no time.
Looking at the other options, they felt less peaceful and more combative.
A Ring Seraph screamed angel to me. So either it was a winged human with a flaming sword or two, or it was one of those freaky biblical angels with too many eyes and wings coming out of everywhere. Regardless of the form they took, Seraphs were always godly messengers which implied that I might be able to speak to my believers through them. The thought made me slightly uncomfortable as having several literal embodiments of my...godliness...felt odd.
Which left the last option. A Dawn Wyrm Apostle felt like the nuclear option if I had to guess. I would be able to summon at most seven of the things, and they would eat into my creature total, with the benefit of scaling relative to how many slots they took. That felt like a boss monster to me, which would be crazy once my boss bonuses applied to the creature.
Since the creature had Wyrm in its name, I assumed that it was some sort of snake or dragon descendant. That was cool, but if the Wyrms were airborne that would throw a wrench into my plans. Volume was just harder to fill than area. That was a fundamental law of the physical world, and if I spent days and weeks filling up the sky for the Wyrms to fly around, how would I ever extend my domain to the human cities?
Hmm...It felt as if the choice was to stay with what worked with the Woodsingers, lean into religion with the Seraphs, or create big monsters with the Wyrms. It was a puzzle, but one for tomorrow as there was still a chance that I would receive either of the other options and never have to think of the option again.