While M.C.P. and Sweeper generated mana cores, Stew reassigned the mining golems to dig straight down. If "leveling up" was related to how many dungeon floors he built, then digging one stairway after another should give him some quick answers. He sent the remaining slime to help speed the miners along. He named it M.U.L.E. which could stand for Mine Utility Lubrication Entity, but really he just liked the idea of a prospector's mule to go with Big John's "Prospecting" ability. He was itching to try that one out as soon as he had a chance, but there were more pressing concerns right now. He had to get stronger.
He turned his attention to the overall dungeon. He felt like he was seeing it for the first time. It was random and poorly thought out. He had built it all in a hurry, but now he felt like he had been half awake. His thoughts, which had seemed fuzzy since first awakening in the core, now felt much clearer, crisper. Something had happened when he lost consciousness and his core's base personality or whatever it was took over.
Even though he hadn't been awake to experience them, he still had memories of those few minutes. He could feel what it had been like to be the core – cold, calculating, ruthless. He realized the "dungeon rage" he had been blaming on his core was all him. It was just plain fear and anger, and a craving he didn't even know he had. He was tired of getting kicked around. He wanted more. He wanted to be free to make his own decisions and he was realizing the only way he would get to do that would be to become the most powerful dungeon this world had ever seen. Now that he was clearer-headed, he could feel the part of himself that was a dungeon core. It felt like a personal assistant, an A.I., only directly connected to his thoughts.
In fact, it was just like a very smart golem. Maybe there was a reason this dungeon favored golems, why HE favored golems, why a gray core was a perfect fit.
The miners reached level five, but he didn't see a level up notice. He hadn't expected it to be that easy, but he had to be sure. He probably needed to finish out a floor, turn it into a named level, to get the benefit. No problem, he had faster ways now, but he did have a use for a five-story hole in the ground.
He couldn't move Bossy from her level, but what about moving the entire level? He looked at the level menu and found what he was looking for.
[Assign Temple Of The Hidden Moon To New Floor: (1-5)]
He tried to assign it to the fourth floor, but that failed with a message.
[Level 1 Boss Required]
Instead, he tried swapping with Femur's level, and that worked.
Now the bottom of the stair that led to level two ended at the entrance crack that had been outside before. Otherwise, the level was identical to when it had been at the surface. Even the [Natural Light] effect in the boss room looked the same as it had, showing the meadow, the trees, and a small camp the delvers had set up by the entrance.
The actual dungeon entrance had changed though. Femur's level only consisted of the treasure room office, the mana processing rooms, and a stairway to the second floor, so Femur's office was now the new entrance room and it had the same default wooden door to the outside that the wolves had torn down. Was that only three days ago?
Stew was now able to move the temple to the fourth floor. Now he could really get started organizing things. He moved the mana core processing from the first floor to the fifth floor, along with his core room, the storage room, and the arena. The golems, kittens, wolves, goblin, and cow seemed unaffected by the changes, although Femur remarked on the disappearance of the mana core processing rooms.
"How do you make changes so fast? I've never heard of a dungeon that could do that." Femur stared at the blank wall that had been a golem-grinding machine just seconds before.
Stew paused his rework long enough to respond. "I don't know. I've never met any other dungeons. How do they do it?"
"I've always heard they take years of digging to make levels." Femur waved his hands. "Not that I'm complaining. Don't hand me a shovel!"
"Don't worry, I don't need more shovels. You have the first level now. I'll come back to it in a little while, but in the meantime be thinking about anything you need."
"I could use a bed, maybe a freshwater spring, and a spit to roast some rats and mushrooms?" Femur looked around the bare office that was now his entire level other than the stairwell. "Come to think of it, I could use some rats and mushrooms. Living on mana's fine, but I like a good meal now and then, and none of that dungeon bait. Real food."
"I'll see what I can do once I finish downstairs."
Stew switched his attention to the fourth floor and filled Bossy in on the changes. "I was just asking Femur, but I've never asked you, is there anything you need on this level?"
Bossy looked around. "This is a bright, cheery sort of place. Green grass, blue skies." She cocked her horns to the side in a cow's grin. "That's not my preferred aesthetic."
Stew remembered the vision she shared with him when the wolves swore their loyalty. Yeah, not that kind of gal at all. "What do you need, then?"
"I would like to think about it while you work. Please ask me again later." She pointed her nose toward the busy kittens and golem generating actions from her milk. "I have some ideas."
While he was looking at the fourth floor he thought about the Lunar Forge. He didn't think he would be able to move it since it was unlocked by Moonglow, but it swapped to the fifth floor without complaint. Now he had all of his processing on the same floor.
That's when he noticed that he had left Smittee with nothing to do for several hours after he moved Don back to the Arena. He had enough mana cores now and he could have been forging bigger ones or at least generating more mana glass this whole time. He needed a better system. He couldn't afford to lose production just because he became distracted chatting with his level bosses.
Which reminded him to go process the milk and generate more actions. It was getting annoying having to do that every few minutes, worse it was keeping him from getting other things done. He had to solve that too, but one problem at a time.
First, he needed to get the forge productive. He created two new golems and named them "Forge" and "Smelter." He put Smittee in charge of the room and had him direct Smelter to do Smittee's old job of generating mana glass and set Forge to merging every six level one mana cores into one level five mana core.
He switched his attention to the arena where Don was working through a list of combatants. Stew watched for a little while as each pair of combatants faced each other, using Sluice as a mat. The battles took just a few minutes and one or the other would be reduced to rubble and a mana core. Sluice would clean, then things would start again with the next pair. The victor from the last bout would just stand around until their partner respawned and their turn came again. Out of twenty fighters, only two were accomplishing anything at any given time.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
It occurred to Stew that he was looking at it all wrong. He had been so enamored by the idea of a fighting bots puzzle that he hadn't thought properly about what he was trying to accomplish. He wanted these golems to level up. To do that, they needed to fight as much as possible.
He stopped the current fight and tinkered with Don's instructions.
Suddenly every golem in the room was fighting every other golem with the exception of Don whose job now was just to respawn golems and set them to fighting. This didn't generate mana cores as quickly as the mana core processing pit, but with time, they would yield higher-level cores. A nice side benefit would be tougher fighters to help defend the dungeon. He watched the new system run and decided, assuming fights continued to take about two minutes, that this room would pass the M.C.P. room in efficiency once the average fighting golem reached level four. Unless…
He had twenty fighters and ten mana core golems. If he named those ten, they could level up too. He could rotate the golems in groups of ten between the arena and the processing pit on a regular schedule. That way all of the golems would level up and he would get the benefit of processing ten higher-level golems every thirty seconds in the pit and another ten every two minutes in the arena.
And now he had to go feed the kittens again, so no time to think about that.
His system was running, churning out mana cores, mana glass, and fiercer fighters, but there was enough going on now that it was getting hard to stay ahead of the action cost. He was running Bossy and the kittens ragged, and once the kittens and Bossy turned in for the night, production would have to stop.
The good news was that Forge had just finished 10 level 5 mana cores. That hadn't taken long at all.
[Popular Dungeon]
[Consume Mana Cores?]
Here goes.
[CATEGORY 1 CORE ACHIEVED!]
[Congratulations! You have ascended to Category 1. As your power grows, so does the depth of your dominion. Unleash new potential and discover the mysteries and wonders of the abyss, but beware, for the abyss also hides terrors unimagined.]
[Wonder Unlocked: Big Red Button - This big red button may be pressed once per second.]
[Mystery Unlocked: Dungeon Moss - The release of arcane energies has caused a strange, glowing moss to grow in cracks and crevices throughout the dungeon. It grows better in some places than others.]
[Terror Unlocked: Stone Weevils - Shaped like tiny drills, these small but hungry parasites are attracted to enchanted stone, weakening it as they feed.]
[Unlock Level 10 Resources (10 level 10 mana cores)]
"Category 1," What am I a hurricane? And stone weevils!?
He stretched his attention out through the dungeon and found the moss almost immediately, thick growths in some places and almost none in others. He wasn't sure how he felt about having moss growing on him, but he was absolutely sure how he felt about being infested with bugs! He ignored the moss and kept searching until he felt an awful itching sensation.
Sure enough, it was in the storage room. The ones he felt were in the walls, but he had a bad feeling about why they might be in that room in particular.
Sluice was busy in the arena and Sweeper and M.U.L.E. had their own jobs, so he spawned another slime in the storage room. He switched his attention to the new slime and formed an eye, but still couldn't see because he hadn't set the lighting back in the storage room after the attack and repairs. He turned on the light as bright as he could. There was no moss growing here, but by changing the shape and size of the slime's eye, he managed to see tiny specks crawling on his wall. This was bad. The mana glass was covered with them, and that was worse. Two bars collapsed into green dust as he watched.
He checked his stats and confirmed that he had just lost two mana capacity. He lost ten more as he was looking.
"Can you eat those weevils?" He asked the slime.
The slime crawled up the mana glass repository and spread itself over an infested bar. It slurped at the bar like a lollipop cleaning off the weevils and trapping them inside itself where they immediately began to dissolve. The slime moved on to the next bar and the next.
Stew was relieved to see that setting the slime to de-weeviling duty had only cost one action. It would take it time to eat all of them, but it looked like it was winning the battle.
He checked around the rest of the dungeon and found more weevils in the mana core pit and the arena. He added weevils to both Sweeper and Sluice's menu of things to clean up. He couldn't think of a way to add that to M.U.L.E's work for free, but he also didn't find any weevils among the miners. He thought about naming the new slime "Timon" or "Pumba" but instead just called it "Exterminator 1" with the expectation that he was going to need more.
He did his best to focus, but having an itch he couldn't scratch was too distracting. It wasn't until Exterminator finished with the mana glass repository and the three slimes started cleaning his walls and floors that he could relax.
He left the lights on in the storage room though he wasn't sure Exterminator 1 needed light to find the weevils. He was glad to see Smelter had already started to replace the lost mana glass.
And, of course, it was time to feed the kittens again.
Once he finished that, he finally had a chance to check his stats.
[Unnamed Core] - Category 1 Gray Core
[13:41]
[Levels: 5]
[Minions: 2]
[Monsters: 48]
[Mana: 127/365]
[Actions Remaining: 14]
[Action Recovery: 10 / day]
[1. Generate Mana]
[2. Monsters And Minions]
[3. Build]
[4. Customization]
[5. Inventory]
[6. Consume Mana Cores]
[7. Press The Button]
The menu was different, but he was disappointed to see how much it stayed the same. The system now acknowledged that he was a gray core, and he had about ten times the activity regeneration which was nice, but kind of irrelevant. He still didn't have a name or any idea how to get one. It didn't seem to want to call him "Stew."
He had hoped for some new kind of monster or defense – turrets, turrets would have been good.
The level count made no sense. He only had one named level, and a long stairway. He could see calling it three levels, but why did his stats show five levels if the System wouldn't give him the category credit for them? He poked around and found something under "Customization."
[Show partial levels? (Y/N)]
When he selected "No" it didn't do quite what he expected. It showed one level, but added "Floors" to his stats and a "Levels" menu item appeared, which seemed to be just a shortcut to the Customization options for that level. That might be handy later when he had more levels.
[Levels: 1]
[Floors: 5]
He also found an option to turn off the clock. That had been a nice feature when he was stuck in the void, but now it made him feel like he was late to work.
Way to focus on the priorities, Stew. He knew he was stalling. He wanted to believe he was too wise to fall for the big, candy-like option at the bottom of his menu. After all, It had come bundled with mystery moss and weevils, but he knew he was going to give in eventually.
No matter how he resisted, he knew he was going to Press The Button.
But first, he had to feed the kittens.