The mirror star picked up and spread the instinctual desires and reactions of each information bundle. The animal bundles each held a strong desire for food and safety. The bat searched for a colony to join. The snake searched for a burrow to hide in. The spider yearned to build a web. The jellyfish drifted. The plant bundles synchronized their desires for water, soil, light, grow, make seeds. The dungeon instincts drank in the mirrored light, full of these desires, and brought out its own desire to grow.
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All across the dungeon, spawn fruit stopped falling. The dungeon core brightened as it increased the amount of mana it drew out of the void. Thick streams of mana and water flowed through all the major branches of the dungeon vine, stimulating rapid growth. Over the next week, the dungeon vine pushed through to four new worldlets.
*bloop*
The first worldlet opened at the end of a branch of the water aligned vine in the sauna worldlet. The branch, empowered with the heightened mana stream, shoved into the new worldlet, and sank roots into thin mud. The mud and rocks were illuminated with a blue-green light. The branches and leaves of the vine spread out across pools of mud surrounding small boulders. The water spray from the vine left the boulders slippery and softened the mud even further.
*bloop*
The second worldlet opened off the main worldlet, farther from the entrance that the delta worldlet entrance. The vine roots settled into the bank of a small stream that wound through a mixture of rocks and clay loam. A dark green light saturated the worldlet and turned the stream opaque.
*bloop*
The third worldlet opened in the delta worldlet, behind a grove of apricot trees the dungeon people had planted. The roots dug deep into a soft sandy clay loam, wet from a recent rain. A bright white light shone down between a few clouds.
*bloop*
The fourth worldlet was another off the main worldlet, this time between the entrance and the portal to the sauna worldlet. The vine roots scrabbled on a bed of gravel and sand. To the left of the entrance, the gravel transitioned to sand which transitioned to silt which bordered a calm lake of clear water. To the right, the gavel increased in size and became large boulders that sat at the foot of sheer stone cliffs.
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The boss bat lay stretched out on the largest vine in the underwater worldlet. A handful of bats hung nearby, but most of the colony had been killed recently in a fight with a particularly subtle snake that had already eaten half the colony before it was spotted and destroyed. No spawn fruit fell and no bats replenished the colony. There were no fish to chase or enemies to battle. The boss bat let out a long, soft squeak. It was bored.
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The underworld snake slid slowly through the tunnels, but its heart wasn’t in it. It was pretty sure there was a single bat left in the dungeon underworld, but the snake had never managed to corner the bat or find whatever crack it hid in to rest. Without proper prey, the snake returned to the central tunnel, directly under the roots of the dungeon vine. It lay still and listened to the dungeon music, morose.
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Hana sent small teams into the new dungeon floors each time someone noticed a new portal. Without dungeon fruit spawning creatures or new apricot trees, there was no point in maintaining a presence in the new floors, but Hana couldn’t let her people stay idle during a crisis. They organized a larger group to systematically visit dungeon floor that they deemed ‘safe’ and return with any dungeon creatures present to be used as food. Hana hoped they would find a new area with active spawning underway. Without meat, the grove of apricot trees would not be enough to support the people for long.
The harvesters had figured out months ago that the stout sticks that sometimes spawned from the dungeon fruit could be used to chill an area when shoved into the ground. The harvesting scout group used a few poles to explore the edges of the sauna floor, discovering the new swamp floor, and returning with a few baskets of creatures from the quicksand floor. Not one of the scouts felt confident in swimming through the underwater floor, especially when they spotted the big bat with glowing white eyes. Hana and the other protectors under Hill Lord Andebert had all been informed that the acid rain floor only led to a deathtrap full of those awful jellyfish, so Hana had the scouts skip that floor, even if a new floor had appeared and could be explored, it was clear that nothing new had spawned anywhere in the dungeon. When the scouting team failed to find any more dungeon creatures to harvest, Hana ordered everyone to conserve energy and cut rations down to almost nothing.
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Inside the dungeon mind space, the plant and dungeon instincts absorbed almost every scrap of mental energy and fed it into the desire to grow. The information bundles moved around weakly or not at all. The plant bundles wilted and yellowed. The animal bundles felt hunger. The drain on mental energy weakened the mushroom network fibers enough that they began to break on their own, without being torn. The snake and bat were so drained that they could hardly coil or shiver. The evergreen vine suffered a few frozen branches with each blizzard.
As each day passed without rest or satiation, the hunger in the bundles grew. The mirror star caught and reflected that hunger, intensifying the effect. Eventually, a tipping point was reached and the foundational instincts felt the hunger more strongly than the desire to grow. The plant instincts pulled sustenance from light, which was plentiful in most of the dungeon. The hunger did not decrease but pushed hard on the dungeon instincts. The dungeon instincts roiled with unspent mental energy as it tried to find a path to satisfy the hunger. A dungeon does not eat. It grows by claiming the void, but that is does by expending energy, not consuming. The only “substance” a dungeon could be considered to consume was experience. Experience was acquired by attacking intruders.