None of their previous zones had required quite this much planning, but the way they were growing was making things harder already, in addition to the things they specifically wanted to accomplish with this new zone.

For one of those things, Moriko had been preparing the location for the past two days, but her work was going to be the last of the major pieces to be completed.

Right now, Kazue was checking that everything was ready one last time during the dark of the night. They would begin a few hours before dawn as they didn't want any surges of inhabitant strength to cause a battle to go wrong and get someone too badly injured.

There was no question about how much territory they were going to claim, they'd calculated out the space exactly against the maps they had available. It cut across the outer hunting grounds of the kobold tribe's territory, so there had been some negotiation to purchase that land from them.

Thankfully, being an established political entity ensured that there was an established methodology for negotiating such a thing, though that did not mean it was simple. In the end, the elders of the tribe had negotiated that any tribe members delving the dungeon's outer zones would have a small increase in their allotted rewards.

Kazue hadn't even known they could do that. But when the kobolds had suggested it, she had tested how the balance of that bargain felt and was surprised that it resolved so readily. A permanent and ongoing gain offsets a permanent and ongoing loss. However, what they could offer the kobolds was less of a boost than the kobolds had asked for.

After experimenting with possible scenarios, Kazue had determined that they had simply reached the limit of how large a permanent bonus could be granted to that type of group. A group of specific individuals had more leeway, but a tribe was a population with changing membership as people were born and died.

Another bit of preparation had begun shortly after they had finished working on their ocean zone. Sarcomaag had grown tendrils of mycelium past the borders of their territory and into the land they were going to be claiming and then used his presence as a sort of scaffolding to coax thinner roots of living crystal to do the same. This growth had only happened with the expenditure of mana, and it cost far more mana than one might think.

The initial expenditure had been easy to determine, but this subtle breach of their territory was also causing a small but steady leak proportional to the amount of fungal boss and crystal matrix that existed outside of the dungeon. A normal inhabitant or boss could step outside of the dungeon and they would simply lose access to the dungeon's mana and support, but having such an unusual inhabitant extending this way caused mana flow down the mycelium, keeping it just as strong as the rest of their raid boss's body.

This process was only done on the mortal side of reality; space was more flexible in Faerie and the proper amount of land would grow to match their territory.

It was along these tendrils that Kazue slowly extended grasping threads of dungeon mana that sought to claim the territory. At the same time, she was drawing similar threads of mana down in a long arc through the air from their crystal tree, though these threads had no physical matrix to support them. As each thread reached the ground, she tied it into the network of threads that were already present.

As the network of mana grew denser and more of the area began to fill in, the density of the mana started fluctuating. Without regulation, this new zone would be slightly stronger than the earth zone, but that was not the goal Kazue and Mordecai were aiming for.

Now the living crystal came into play. Kazue shunted excess mana down into the crystal matrix, where it was immediately channeled down into the first underground zone, which had slightly less dense mana than the earth zone did.

This was the difficult balancing act that they had been preparing for. Mordecai and Kazue had already figured out how the zones were going to expand if they didn't interfere: in any 'direction', the power of the zones was going to jump as if a person had traversed three zones instead of one.

Neither Kazue nor Mordecai felt that this was a good idea, and this was their solution: rebalance the mana density of the zones, shoving a portion of the power from a stronger zone into a weaker zone to even them out.

It was something that would never have worked with a normal dungeon growth pattern; they could only do it here because of the many 'edges' to the zones. The territory that Kazue was claiming right now touched three other zones, and might touch four in the future. A new zone normally only touched one other zone, and eventually two.

While she was doing this, her avatar was flying around the zone and looking for any unstable spots her core might have missed. Mordecai's core was doing the same, focusing mostly on the outermost part of the zone.

Mordecai's avatar wouldn't be able to step out into the new zone until it was fully claimed, so he was traveling along the outside of the Hunting Grounds to see if he could detect any issues from inside their territory.

The mana did not want to cooperate and Kazue found her endurance being tested by having to continually wrestle with it. She had to get it under control before the territory claim was finalized or it would be even harder to change in the future.

For all that this process was going to violate the way a dungeon 'should' grow, they had two things weighing in their favor. First and foremost was the simple awareness that keeping jumps in power smaller would be fairer for delvers wishing to travel along a single direction or theme, which would be most of them. They were basically normalizing the delvers' experience.

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The second thing was that growing 'out' indefinitely could be problematic, so they might have to have far more 'up' zones than 'out' zones. Prearranging their zone pattern to grow in jumps of 'two' instead of 'three' would keep the growth pattern stable instead of having irregular jumps of power between zones.

Admittedly, the outward growth issues were political, not fundamental to the nature of an environmental dungeon. The vast expanse that the southern dungeon occupied was an example of that. But they had bound themselves with political agreements, so for them the issues were real.

Kazue and Mordecai kept both of these concepts near the front of their minds, maintaining a focus on why they were doing this work while they wrestled with the recalcitrant mana.

It took several hours to complete and stabilize, with the inhabitants having to inform the delvers throughout all the underground zones that it was not safe to proceed once dawn arrived. Kazue was mentally exhausted by the end of it, but they accomplished their goal before the new shape of their reality snapped into place.

The earth zone, the new zone, and Kazue's original underground zone were all maintaining the same density of mana and power.

She could even feel that her intention for the zone's theme had partially manifested, but she stepped back to let Mordecai take over from there. He'd had to let her shoulder most of the burden during the process of claiming, so it was his turn to work hard while she rested.

Mordecai's first step was to sweep over the new territory to find as many animals as possible to invite as new inhabitants. The ecological tier creatures, such as the vast majority of plant and insect life, were simply incorporated automatically. Anything with more sense of self and a stronger spirit had to be manually invited.

He did find two exceptions amongst the insects.

The first was a species of praying mantis that had adults weighing between ten to twenty pounds. Such large insects had an innately magical aspect to them of course, but the growth also allowed further refinement of their evolution.

While he wasn't quite sure what their natural life span maximum would be, at the very least he expected them to live more than five years, while normal ones often barely lived a single year. This included survival mechanisms for surviving harsh winters in the forested regions of the mountain, more advanced senses and neural network, and a slower reproduction rate matched with better caretaking of eggs and hatchlings.

While they certainly weren't sapient, they had about as much spiritual presence as a normal mammal or bird of their size, and thus required invitations to join as inhabitants. Mordecai was a bit surprised at how quickly all of them accepted the invitation, but that surprise was mitigated when he noticed that the few older males were the ones to accept first. These would be the ones with the best survival instincts. Younger males followed in emulation, and the females followed from the instinctive drive to not be deprived of potential mates.

Given the mating habits of mantises, their social dynamics were going to be interesting as their minds awoke. Kazue reacted swiftly to the dawning realization of potential issues and quickly started organizing those more mature inhabitants who had found that they were good at helping others through emotional trauma. Neither of them knew that the mantises would necessarily develop trauma from their pre-sapience memories, but no one wanted to take a chance.

The second exception amongst the insects was a strange species of beetles. Namely, a eusocial hive of horned beetle relatives.

While the praying mantises might be the result of a natural mutation, these most certainly were not. The first sign of this was that a quick observation identified what looked to be several dozen species and a deeper inspection of the occasional dead body showed that each contained the information for over a hundred different ones, though clearly not all were being used at the moment.

The individual beetles ranged from two to five pounds each, and the queen was a little over thirty pounds. She was also the source that left Mordecai very confident in his assumption that they were an escaped experiment: she was incapable of producing eggs that had the right information to become new queens.

Additionally, the rest of the beetles were evenly divided between males and females, rather than the males being reserved for breeding. Combine all of this with a true, if non-sapient, hive mind and you had the picture of an experiment with several levels of safeties built in. The hive could grow within feasible limits, but it could never produce a second hive and it would not survive the eventual death of the queen.

When the queen accepted the invitation, there was some internal confusion for the hivemind as it started to adjust to the new reality. Mordecai honestly wasn't certain if the individual beetles would gain sapience over time or if only the hive as a whole would be sapient.

As for plant life, there was only a singular example that was going to need to be talked with, and this wasn't a job for his core.

Mordecai's avatar slowly walked toward a great tree that was high up on the mountain. From below, it only stood out a little, and that small bump in height made it seem like a normal tree growing on top of a small uprising or such.

The truth was quite the opposite. It was growing at the very end of a deep but narrow ravine and simply grew far above the lip of that ravine; Mordecai was approaching from the top of the cliff, which was how he was able to see the top this clearly. He glanced into the ravine and noted that there was a well-worn dirt trail and some small signs of respect being paid to the tree.

Obviously, the kobolds had known it was special, but if they had understood just how special, he doubted they would have sold the land for anything!

Well, this one was well asleep or it would have noticed them claiming territory around it and done something. Time for negotiations, he just hoped that this one wasn't going to wake up grumpy. Mordecai took a seat at the edge of the cliff looking out on the tree.

Let's see, normal language probably wouldn't work here, that would be just so much noise right now. But Mordecai had much more than that to call upon. He exhaled softly and upon his breath rode scents designed to be picked up by leaf and root, though they would have to sink into the soil before the latter could happen. The message here was simply a sense of urgency, though no warning of danger came with it.

After a few minutes of letting that build up Mordecai spoke, but it would not sound like speech to most. Rustling leaves, cracking wood, and low deep vibrations meant to travel through the earth; these were the components of this language.

"Greetings great one. Happenstance has placed us in a position to need conversation with unseemly haste, and for that, I apologize. I hope that my disturbing your rest will not be too great a bother."

Several more minutes passed before the subtlest shifts began, and the tree replied, "Hmm? Mordecai, is that finally you?"

Or, possibly, the kobolds knew exactly how special this tree was and had pranked him.