The trader nomads passed by at noon the next day. Oz spent the morning practicing the sling and spearing a few fish from the stream to cook and eat. The traders walked up the path alongside a column of colorful covered wagons. The traders were not especially interested in buying Oz’s flint orbs, but they traded a small trinket for them as a curiosity. When Oz tried to subtly mention trading dungeon creature harvests, one trader woman said a strange thing: “No room for spider silk. Too much spider silk. I tell him-“ Then the woman suddenly stopped speaking. She momentarily looked distressed, but quickly continued. “I tell you there are too many spiders. Too many spiders all over. Everyone trade spider silk.” Then she walked stiffly away and vanished among the other trader nomads. Oz wasn’t sure how to interpret her actions.
After the traders had moved on, Oz speared another fish from the stream to eat. He passed a mostly idle afternoon at the roundhouses, but with no one to talk to and nothing to do, he decided that his investigations had stalled. The two people from last night would be suspicious if he remained another night to try and talk to them again. He walked back home, arriving late in the night. In the morning, he gave his new trinket to one of his little cousins.
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The dungeon core mind had begun life with a set of dungeon core instincts and a set of plant instincts. These instincts formed the foundation for the higher reasoning and memory systems of the dungeon mind, but in this particular dungeon the mind had not formed when the dungeon core was created. The ‘space’ for the dungeon core mind had been left empty.
As the dungeon core unlocked creature spawns and absorbed creatures, dense information bundles about the creatures flowed into the dungeon core’s mind. This information defined the physical makeup of creature spawn and provided the instincts to allow the creatures to function. When a creature spawned, the creature instincts were copied out of the dungeon mind and overlayed with a set of instincts that compelled obedience to dungeon core commands and stopped dungeon creatures from trying to leave the dungeon.
In the Terse Elements dungeon core mind, these bundles of information drifted around the mostly empty space. Sensory information from inputs such as the eye vine mutation and the fairy’s music seeped into the mind space and fell like rain. The drifting information bundles absorbed some of the sensory information, each according to its nature. The remaining sensory data fell down and inundated the foundational instincts of plant and dungeon core.
The bundle of butterfly information flapped slowly near the “ground” in the dungeon core mind space. It had caught onto one part of the plant instincts and had been caught by an aspect of the dungeon instincts. The butterfly bundle formed a permanent connection between the two sets of instincts, a connection that caused the dungeon vine to flower.
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As butterfly numbers increased all over the dungeon, the visual data seeping into the mind space contained more and more instances of butterflies and butterfly movement. The bundle of frog information soaked up all the butterfly visual data it could reach. Every flap of bright colored wings fed into the frog instincts for catching prey. The frog instincts stimulated the rest of the bundle to turn and scan for more prey. The visual data was too fleeting and could not be tracked like proper food. The frog bundle drifted around the mind space, trying to feed its instinctual hunger.
A stream of particularly dense visual data pushed the frog bundle towards the “ground”. As it scanned for food, it saw the butterfly bundle. Here was prey that held still long enough for the frog instincts to churn through the calculations for a tongue strike. The instincts signaled the physical frog information, and a line of information shot from the frog bundle. The line struck and adhered to the butterfly bundle.
In many ways, the frog bundle was the quintessential frog. Every frog in the dungeon was constructed from the information in the frog bundle and shared it’s instincts. The frog bundle, however, lacked a physical form and so was unable to exert any force on either the butterfly bundle or the “tongue” that connected the two bundles. The frog instincts had no concept of this situation and got stuck in a loop, trying to move on to the next step of swallowing and eating the food. The jellyfish information bundle drifted past.
A short time later, the snake information bundle spotted the mostly stationary frog bundles. The snake bundle slithered across the ground and up the frog tongue. It clamped down on the frog and looped its information around the frog as though it had real coils, squeezing hard. The frog instincts flipped back and forth between trying to eat and trying to escape. The three entangled information bundles continued to drift in the space but were constrained by their tether to the plant and dungeon core instincts.
One other information bundle moved towards the butterfly-frog-snake conglomeration. The mushroom bundle pushed thin tendrils along the ground in all directions. The tendrils crept over the plant and core instincts and pierced into cracks in all the information bundles near the ground. The moss information bundle and the apricot tree bundle lay on the ground due to their nature as plants. As the mushroom tendrils reached further across and into the plant and dungeon core instincts, tiny bits of mana began to flow across the network, in and out of the information bundles. The tendrils between the plant instincts and the apricot tree bundle became swollen with traffic.
Music from the dungeon fairy continuously sent small waves of mana into the dungeon core vine’s mana system, and those waves caused even smaller waves in the dungeon core mind space. The mushroom network fluctuated in response to the music and a small spike of mana jumped from the apricot tree to the foundational plant instincts. Out in the physical dungeon, a new vine grew straight up into the air above the main vine body.
_ Natural Evolution: “Towering Vine” Unlocked _
The jellyfish information bundle bumped into the millipede bundle. They both continued drifting through the mostly empty mind of the dungeon core.