All acts of creation begin with an idea. Sometimes the idea is simple, hazy and unformed. A thought so transient that changes to the original can go unnoticed through the creation process until the final result reveals itself. In such times, the shape of the final product is oftentimes less important than its very existence. Success in these scenarios can be elusive, as a clear conclusion isn’t defined at the outset.
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I did not have that problem. There would be no creative ruminations, or imaginative tangents to discover what my end result would be. I knew exactly what my boss should and would look like, because I had a series of chronic problems that needed to be solved. In simpler terms: I needed to create a tanky boss with the ability to deal damage and evade attacks all in one neat package that fit my current theming of darkness and terror.
A Beholder would be my boss. No other monster would work.
There were several significant issues with choosing a Beholder. Namely, Beholders had a completely different shape to my Nothic, multiple eyes with unique elemental attunements, and could fly. There was also the issue that I didn’t have a clear way of making my prospective Beholder tankier, as any crafted Nothic I created would have the same amount of life. Using my new Totem of the Roller Turtle would improve things considerably but their stationary nature ran counter to the high mobility that I was going for.
The issues were many, but I was confident that I could solve at least a few of them and create a functional boss in short order.
First things first, I would need a base.
Nothic
Level: 7
Level Acquired: 1
Life: 290/290
Resistances: None
Rend: 37-77 Physical Damage
Rotting Gaze: 15-30 Chaos Damage
My level seven Nothic was mighty compared to what it had started off as, but I would make it so much more. The first thing I did though was reach into the monster’s spine and played around with each nerve cluster. I pushed, cut, and made sure I could reconnect each strand individually until I located the pain receptors. As soon as I did, I severed the strands to hopefully minimize the pain during the following steps. The result was perfect except that — for some reason — my Nothic lost all sense of balance and coordination. I fiddled with it for a bit, but nothing I did brought back the coordination without also bringing back the pain.
Weird.
Unfortunately, my brief experimentation had dropped the Nothic’s health by two points. I reconnected all the nerves and returned everything back the way it was, but that only served to make it lose another point. That meant, life had a spiritual element to it not wholly dependent on the state of the physical vessel. That was annoying, but expected in a world with magic.
I lobotomized my Nothic once more and watched it —unsuccessfully — flop around on the floor. It was probably better than constant pain, but the experience was definitely still traumatizing. Ehh, I tried, that was what counted.
I shook the thoughts of humanitarianism — towards creatures that the system didn’t deem sentient to boot — out of my head and focused back on the task at hand.
In my vision, my Beholder would be large, easily three or four times the mass of a regular Nothic, so I would need flesh to expand upon its body. My halls were still littered with corpses of the undead invaders and most still had flesh that wasn't completely rotten. I reached out and pulled the muscles and bones from the largest and healthiest of the invaders and brought it to my core room.
There, I pulverized the bone and fused it back together in a single gigantic skull with a gaping maw full of needle sharp teeth. I then placed my test subject inside and filled in the empty space with the flesh and blood of the undead. I hooked up the blood vessels to the greater whole and willed the dead flesh to live.
And....problems. Instantly, the Nothic began losing health at a tremendous rate, and I was forced to disconnect it from the dead flesh. I knew that something like this was unlikely to work, but it would make my work easier if it did, so I had to try.
I still needed some way of manipulating flesh, and I wasn’t one to just throw my hands up and give up. Instead, I split off a single muscle fiber from my living Nothic and attempted to augment it with the dead flesh. Muscle fibers were just actin and myosin filaments woven into a dense cord after all.
It took several iterations, but I managed to pentuple the size of the muscle while keeping the cells composing it alive. I then did the same thing with tendons, ligaments and nerves. Bones turned out to be the easiest and also the most difficult of them all. I could create the calcium matrix in a pinch, but I was forced to resort to evenly spacing the living cells within and wait for them to divide to fill up the space.
It wasn’t the perfect simple solution I was hoping for, and took a fair amount of time and concentration, but for now it would do.
I went back through the partially alive skull and distributed the Nothic’s cells throughout it. I filled out the inside with muscle, tendons and the like until my creation didn’t look so anemic. Then, I created six prehensile bone appendages evenly spaced in a halo around the skull and fit eye sockets on the ends of each. As a safety, I created two bulky legs underneath the bulk just in case I couldn’t get the thing to fly by the time I was done.
What I was left with was a twitching, dead-looking Beholder with only a single eye, but by god its heart was beating.
I was missing the eyes for the six secondary eyes, but instead of spending time and effort on figuring out what made Nothic eyes special to make my own, I scoured my halls and located the six corpses of my original Nothic. From each, I pulled out their toxic green eye and stuck each on to the end of the six stalks on the Beholder. I then split the optic nerve on the Nothic into seven and threaded them to each of the eyes.
I poked my ‘Beholder’ to test if what I’d done worked, and each of its eyes wiggled. I took that as an absolute win and took a minute to double check all the muscles and nerves were connected the way they should before continuing on.
Next were the eyes.
For the primary eye it was fine that it dealt chaos damage, but it would need to be a whole lot larger. From the dead in my halls I collected vitreous fluid and spare optic lens and used them to fill out my budding boss’ primary eye to nearly a meter in diameter. To support the colossal mass, I bulked up the rotator muscles of the eye and with a few more adjustments I had myself a proper looking Beholder.
The other eyes though, would need additional adjustments and attunement. I hadn’t been in this world long, but from what I understood, it was relatively easy to get resistances for a single damage type, but hard to get them for many. At least for adventurers. My minions seemed to get resistances all across the board which I couldn’t complain about.
That meant that the optimal play was not trying to buff my creatures' damage but to allow them to deal many different types of damage or deal esoteric damage whose corresponding resistance was rare. My little Beholder would get all the elements available to me.
The first eye would deal shadow damage. It was a ubiquitous element in my dungeon and I already had experience attuning creatures to the element. It only took me a second to crack open one of my spare Shadow Sources and fuse it with the first eye’s lens.
The second element I was thinking of was lightning, and should also be easy in theory. A quick scan of my halls revealed dozens of dead lightning salamanders. I scanned their bodies and pulled out their antennae that produced the lightning. With a concentrated effort of will, I attempted to find the organ that created the lightning but the more I searched the less I was confident there was such an organ. As far as I could tell, the antenna on the little buggers did nothing more then sense stuff.
It was frustrating, but I quickly adapted. Instead of lightning, I would use fire which would work just fine. The forest was still slightly out of my ability to manipulate so wood wasn’t an option but that didn’t mean I couldn’t create heat.
In my core room, I carved out a large stone weighing upwards of ten tonnes and placed it on the ground. Then, while shoving it downwards, I scraped it hard against the floor. In seconds, the temperature at the interface between the two stones skyrocketed. Water hissed into steam as the stones attained a ruddy red glow. Smoke rose to fill my halls as all the volatile carbon compounds vaporized. Another couple strokes and the interface between the stones glowed a bright orange, then white and grew soft and malleable. I smashed the two stones harder and a viscous magma oozed out from the cracks.
With a huge grin, I scooped up the material and fused it with the second eye.
Two down, four more to go.
With a magma typed eye, I really wanted a cold variant. There was no ice anywhere nearby, but I could get access to water. A quick dig down and out to the looser soils near the surface connected me to the water table and within minutes I had a small pool of water collected in my core room. To cool it though, would be much more complicated than just rubbing two rocks together. I would have to create a heat pump of some sort to draw the heat out of the water.
The only heat pumps I was even remotely familiar were air conditioning units, and all I knew about those were that they expanded a liquid in one place and condensed it in another. I set about recreating something of that nature and soon I had two stone pistons connected by two pipes. Luckily, being able to fuse stone perfectly meant I had no trouble perfectly sealing the piston chambers. I filled one end with water, and pulled the piston up. The water bubbled and spat as it vaporized and the stone around the piston cooled. I directed the steam to the other piston and crushed it down as hard as I could back into water. It complied and I repeated the process.
Nearly a thousand cycles later, I felt ice crystals form around the first piston and I rejoiced. The process was horrifically inefficient, and I felt like I was doing something wrong, but eventually I had a sizable chunk of ice. With a crack, I broke the ice away from the piston and brought it over to the Beholder as the element of its third eye.
Fourth, I was thinking stone. Medusas were a thing, and it would be a shame to just ignore all the perfectly good rock all around me. As I fused the stone around me I focused on imagining the petrifying effects of a medusa's gaze, in the hopes that my intent would steer the final product.
Fifth — if I was going to try and use stone — why not air? With a mental grunt of effort I nabbed the air in my boss room and compressed it down. First into a sphere the size of a basketball, then a grape, then a pea. The air temperature spiked as I pushed it together and before I knew it I was holding on to something that looked not all that dissimilar to a sun. My cilia creaked from the effort of holding that white hot sphere, but before I could lose my grip I brought the material over the the fifth eye and willed them to bond.
I had one last eye left, and I was out of reasonable options. Bone was an option, but so was flesh and all manner of biological substances, though none appealed to me as I already dealt chaos damage with the main eye. I could theoretically try scrounging some broken sticks from the forest’s edge, but Wood didn’t really feel like a violent and deadly element to me.
What about...Yes.
I turned my attention outwards, to the face of my cliff and I studied the rays of sunlight piercing the edge of the Deep Dark. If I was in a fantasy world full of magic and nonsense, why couldn’t I grab, say...sunlight as an element for the eye?
I focused intently on the light and willed the photons bombarding my darkness to collect in my cilia. I felt something respond and I giggled, but before the raw sunlight could collect enough for me to use it, it faded. Not to be deterred, I brought the Beholder to the edge of my domain and poked its single unattuned eye out of the darkness and repeated the process.
Success!
With that, my Beholder was complete. It was ugly, had two legs but with an effort of will I finalized the craft and the system recognized it.
Multi Crafted Nothic
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+24 life
Level: 7
Level Acquired: 1
Life: 198/314
Resistances: None
Rend: 37-77 Physical Damage
Rotting Gaze: 28-57 Chaos Damage
Molten Gaze: 15-30 Fire Damage
Frost Gaze: 15-30 Ice Damage
Darkness Gaze: 15-30 Shadow Damage
Slashing Gaze: 15-30 Physical Damage
Radiant Gaze: 15-30 Radiant Damage
Petrifying Gaze: slows targets
I giggled silently as I studied the status. The system recognized each of the eyes, and they all dealt the same amount of damage as a regular Nothic’s eye which was better than expected. What wasn’t so great was that while the primary eye’s damage had increased, it hadn’t grown to the same level as a Nothic’s regular Rend attack. It was still fine as my Beholder would still deal almost twice as much damage as a regular Nothic and had multiple elements that would be hard to counter working in its favor. Plus, it had the added bonus of all the bonus damage being ranged in nature.
The worst part though, was that despite my best efforts, my boss was hella injured. It was unfortunate, but I wasn’t done just yet. Worst case, I would remake it and hurt it less the second go around.
The next upgrade was to get rid of those feet and figure out some way to get my lumbering monstrosity into the air. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but a Beholder that didn’t fly was like pizza without cheese.
I thought about thrusters and wings and even thought about a crane that would roll on a gantry mounted to the ceiling. Every option I came up with sounded plausible, but ultimately absurd or unsustainable. That was, until I glanced at my core and noted the way my crystal was floating perfectly in the air.
A ripple of interest passed through my dungeon as I zeroed in on my core. My cilia held up my core perfectly still and level. The method had the benefit of being invisible to adventurers, and I knew from experience that my cilia would have no trouble lifting—
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I stared at a scaled bat creature flit into the edge of my domain and land on a little alcove halfway up my cliff face. Its huge ears swiveled as it let out a series of rapid clicks from its open mouth. It’s cute little eyes blinked with a wet double membrane, and it ruffled its wings in an endearing little shuffle that screamed contentment.
I blinked at it, trying to understand what just happened, before I snarled in impotent rage at having my train of thought derailed by dungeon hibernation. That was it. I was done with this constant loss of attention when no adventurers came around. Especially since it hadn’t taken nearly this long for the first hibernation episode a level or two ago.
With dark thoughts clouding my mood, I reached out and shifted a stone a dozen meters above where the bat nestled. As carefully as I could I aligned my shot, then released. The stone fell silently, and cracked against the bat’s head with and audible crunch. I froze, worried for a second that I had killed the bat, but the small aura around the little guy didn’t dissipate.
I sighed, berating myself, for nearly killing the creature.
What followed was a painfully long ordeal of forming a stone box around the bat, and then shifting the box deep into my dungeon. Despite the bat’s miniscule aura, I still had so little control over its surroundings that it was downright embarrassing.
I then hollowed out a room beneath my core and created a set of rails encircling the room. Several sets of wheels fused to the bottom of the box later and I had myself a janky merry go round.
With a tiny little push, the cart grumbled around.
< Mana: 5/714 >
< Mana: 6/714 >
I let out a sigh of relief. The thing worked. It was slow as crap, but still better than the distant effect of the neighboring forest. I spent some extra time filling the train room with more cilia and noticed a small increase in mana production.
I huffed in irritation as I turned back to my Beholder.
Where was I...
Right. I needed to get the thing into the air, and the cilia holding up my floating core seemed like an incredible solution.
The only issue was that my cilia warped uncontrollably as soon as an adventurer passed by. That would throw around my Beholder all over the place if I somehow anchored it to my matrix, but...if I could craft with light and shadow, why couldn’t I craft...myself?
Tentatively, I reached out to my cilia and attempted to manipulate one of the strands. It was awkward, like trying to write with a marker clenched between my butt cheeks. The strands were hair thin, and naturally repelled my other strands. The feature was perfect for getting evenly spaced strands and maximizing the mana acquisition from invaders, but for this it was a right pain.
I persevered, and after a fair bit of experimentation I managed to weave several dozen strands into a single thick rope of the ethereal substance that my cilia were composed of. The thing was totally unresponsive now, but displayed incredible material properties. As far as I could tell the rope of cilia-stuff had a tensile strength an order of magnitude greater than steel and was infinitely flexible to the point it could slide through itself if necessary.
It was a weird material that could selectively interact with the material plane. Odd, but absolutely perfect for my purposes. With a shiver of glee, I tied one end of my rope to the ceiling of the chamber and the second to a large muscle within the Beholder’s skull.
I poked my Beholder a few times until it tensed and bobbed up and down on its string. I giggled in glee, as my Beholder froze and then experimented with its weird new muscle that moved it...up.
I fell into a crafting fugue as I created five more ropes and attached them between the Beholder and various corners of the room. Then, instead of attaching the ropes directly to muscles, I built six gear boxes to the attachment points of the muscles and attached the ropes to them. I followed that with clearing out most of the extraneous muscles in the Beholder and replaced them with six gigantic ones that had direct access to each of the ropes. Those two features would give the Beholder more range, and smooth out the force curve to hopefully make it easier to learn to navigate the new system of locomotion.
With a giggle that blew air through my dungeon, I stepped back and watched in wonder as it began to...play. It still had no coordination, but it exuded a childlike excitement as it wobbled around the room in fits and spurts. A few times it nearly pulled itself apart as it pulled on two opposing ropes, but even without pain, it quickly learned to avoid doing that.
I studied it and saw that it was having trouble rotating. I shifted the end position on some of the ropes, and added a seventh rope for good measure. By the time I was done checking and double checking everything, my cute little Beholder was whizzing around the room at eye watering speeds.
It was perfect. The ropes were invisible to the naked eye and were easily strong enough to withstand the forces involved. If anything I had to reinforce the stone on the walls as they crackled dangerously whenever the Beholder pulled particularly hard. I saw it as a complete success, and amputated the creature’s two legs to give it the iconic shape of a proper Beholder. With the lost weight, the Beholder only zoomed faster around the room.
That brought me to the last problem. Its life.
Namely, it didn’t have much life for a boss. My manhandling didn’t help either. In an effort to organize my thoughts, I summoned the Totem of the Roller Turtle and pulled up both the totem and my Beholder’s status.
Totem of the Roller Turtle
Level: 7
Level Acquired: 6
Life: 313/313
Resistances: 30%
Multi Crafted Nothic
+24 life
Level: 7
Level Acquired: 1
Life: 139/314
Resistances: 30%
Rend: 37-77 Physical Damage
Rotting Gaze: 28-57 Chaos Damage
Molten Gaze: 15-30 Fire Damage
Frost Gaze: 15-30 Ice Damage
Darkness Gaze: 15-30 Shadow Damage
Slashing Gaze: 15-30 Physical Damage
Radiant Gaze: 15-30 Radiant Damage
Petrifying Gaze: slows targets
[Spin Dash]: Dash forward bouncing and damaging anything you hit
19-39 Physical damage
Cooldown: 25 minutes
[Ethereal Shell]: Gain a shield that increases resistances by 30% and maximum resistances by 5%
Shield breaks after taking 93 damage
Cooldown: 3 minutes
Shield duration: 40 seconds
The totem was a dull green faceted emerald stuck to the top of a lumpy pedestal rising to roughly waist height off the ground. It was shockingly mundane, which I supposed was half the point as getting targeted was the last thing the totem would want.
The thirty percent resistances would help my Beholder act the boss, but it needed much more life than that to be a proper one. I would be satisfied with at least five hundred life or better yet a thousand or more. Hell, it needed multiple health bars too for each different phase of the fight...
Wait...
Why couldn’t I give it multiple health bars? Or more accurately, why couldn’t I cover it in the skin of another Nothic which would absorb the first three hundred and fourteen damage and then would fall off to reveal the undamaged boss. Or...why waste a create slot if I could use the Totem of the Roller Turtle somehow.
Excited I settled in to find some way to wrap the totem around the Beholder. It turned out to be trickier than I thought. I couldn’t move the totem, or I could, but as soon as I did, the gemstone cracked and I had to restart. The probability that the Totem actually rejected movement was unlikely as that meant that it should break instantly if we were on a planet that rotated. If we weren’t on such a celestial body — which was weird but totally possible in this place — a stray earthquake would do the same.
All that was to say, that I dove into figuring out what caused the cracking with zeal. After three failed attempts, I narrowed down the reason for the cracking to the way the gemstone interacted with my cilia. Unlike my Nothic, the Totem had one tiny little cilia of its own that poked out the bottom of the emerald and into the stone of the floor. That cilia wrapped around one of my own threads but lacked all the strength and toughness that my own threads had. Even the slightest shift of the stone beneath the totem would snap its thread and propagate cracks up through the gemstone. It was a fascinating case study of how these things worked, but luckily, I had already inadvertently solved this problem.
I summoned another Totem, except this time I grew the gemstone off of one of the thick ropes holding the Beholder up. The totem accepted that as a valid cilia — despite my inability to directly control it — and managed to stay uncracked while the Beholder flew around. The fact that the rope never moved relative to the gemstone was the secret that allowed the Totem to become mobile.
I wasn’t done yet. With an effort of will I carefully reshaped the gemstone into a huge hollow shell across the surface of the Beholder. It was hyper thin, which had me worried that piercing strikes would hit both the Totem and the Beholder but for now it was good enough. Especially since it granted my boss’ rugged hide a viridescent shimmer.
< Beholder Life: 137/314 (450/627) >
Hmm. Four fifty effective life was fifty percent better than three hundred, but there was still that annoying vulnerability to piercing damage. I tried several things to heal it — including a force feeding it a healing potion left over from Martin’s pack — but nothing worked.
In the end I decided to cut my losses and try and see if starting over would work. I surreptitiously reached into my Beholder’s head and excised the nervous system. In a flash my Beholder fell limp and its life plummeted to zero. Before the meat could die, I grabbed one the Nothic I had been summoning every five hours, and removed its ability to sense pain. I then cut a incision in the side of the Beholder’s corpse and navigated the new Nothic inside. As carefully as I could, I reattached all the nerves and organs to their proper places.
When I was done, I nervously glanced at my new Beholder who seemed just fine. The whole process was really weird. Almost like, I was updating the firmware on robots, rather than replacing the brains of living creatures. It freaked even me out just a hair, but the Beholder didn’t seem to care and was rediscovering the joys of flight all over again.
I shook the thought aside and summoned its status.
< Beholder Life: 295/314 (608/627) >
I smiled.
I think I’ll call her Betsy
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An unknown number of days had passed since the necromancer incident, so focused was I on crafting Betsy. In that time, I had recovered to full capacity. Betsy the Beholder protected my core while all five of my remaining Nothic roamed my halls which had been cleared of undead corpses. The maze had also gained a fifth floor, expanded slightly in each cardinal direction and had all the traps within it rearmed.
Days had also passed since I had sentenced the poor bat to an endless merry go round in my cellar. It had succumbed to its injuries in that time, but I had managed to acquire another small animal to take its place. An ultra fuzzy chinchilla type creature that had a hard on for chewing stone. Right pain that was, but in the end it was worth it.
< Mana 714/714 >
< You have leveled up! >
< You are now level 8! >
< Mana 0/902 >
< You are now tier 2. Congratulations! >
< +1 to maximum floor count! >
< Consuming your core now elevates sentients to the 3rd tier! >
< Floor 1 creature count: 6/6 >
< Floor 2 creature count: 0/6 >
I felt a grand shift inside of me as I felt my domain split in two. The Deep Dark retreated from the edge of the forest into my cave until it stopped halfway into my maze. Likewise for any Nothic that had been caught near my entrance. On the boundary separating the two parts of my domain, a shimmering barrier formed as my cilia rippled into an intricate fractal matrix I couldn’t hope to control or understand the purpose of.
Bewildered I glanced at the notifications again and idly tried summoning a Nothic.
< Floor 1 creature count: 6/6 >
< Floor 2 creature count: 1/6 >
Huh...
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Monster Factory:
Minions respawn 100 minutes post death
Minions respawn 4 levels lower than your current level
Minions do not respawn if there are no available spawning locations
Sea of Ambrosia:
Chests containing consumables replenish contents 100 minutes post looting
Consumables replenish 1 level lower than their level upon looting
Level 1 consumables do not replenish
-3 to maximum level of crafted consumables
Minions can consume consumables
Armored Generosity:
+2 to maximum gear slots
Gain no benefits from equipped gear
Minions benefit from equipped gear
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End of Arc 1