Aby turned a large majority of its attention to examining the drake, ensuring that nothing too untoward happened to upset the surprisingly precarious situation it had placed him in those long months ago. It knew full well that the huge wave of mana had done something to the reptile, having seen that much as it helped transport the injured wyvern through his floor, but at the time the core had been too focused on ensuring the survival of its first draconic beast to give its second much more than a passing glance and renewing its constant stream of healing.
Now that the wyvern was at least stabilized and it had reviewed the very large changes that took place on the floors above enough to feel confident that they weren’t actively detrimental or outright falling apart, the core wanted to make sure the drake wasn’t heading towards another disaster of his own. Once again, the crystals jutting out of his body had grown even more numerous, and had taken root even deeper into his body as well.
The moderate speckling of jagged spires had become dense to the point of absurdity, and around the point of explosion there was no longer any outwardly visible scale at all. The crystal-cover radiated outward, turning most of his maw into a mottled blue crag, with the elemental crystals coming in a much wider range of shapes. Some were still harsh and angry-looking spines, but others seemed to have been gently smoothed out, others still twisted like a fine sculpture, and more still looking like blue rocks of all sizes were lodged into his body.
The biggest few had wormed deeper still, and the core wasn’t entirely pleased to see that they were no longer just embedded into his bones, they were growing into and replacing them. His skull was the same patchwork of translucent blue power that the outside of his head was, and already the shape was subtly distorting as some patches of skull crystal encountered others, and remained distinct instead of melding.
It wasn’t major yet- it was so subtle in fact that only the core could have noticed any deviation in shape, and even then it took intense scrutiny to be sure that it was indeed happening- but that was a terrible omen all the same, and the core could do nothing to stop it save for healing the creature as it had been in order to keep any rough patches from ripping him up from the inside.
Still, as with every other time the drake’s crystals underwent some sort of change, there were some benefits to be gained along with the growing list of problems. The first thing that came to mind, and a direct result of the drake’s skeleton beginning to turn into the same solid mana as the very crystals growing into him, was an incredible boost to his durability. Mana stones in most all their elemental flavors were very, very hard to break, and only got more ridiculous as they got larger.
If it weren’t for the drake’s immense bite force and Aby choosing a stone that had been mildly drained to begin with, he would’ve had a hard time breaking it at all, and that was already a stone only a fraction the size of the ones that were beginning to make up his skeleton. His limbs might still be made up of mundane bone, but his skull, spine, and ribs were all at least partially converted into the magical material. The only problem was that if he did take a blow strong enough to break his bones, the results would be spectacularly bad. The crystals got more sturdy with size, but they also got more volatile when that was compromised.
That wasn’t all, though. If the way the drake had torn his floor apart while Aby slumbered was any indication, he was stronger again, almost worryingly so now. Aby had spent most of its life constantly reinforcing its caverns, whether that be through compacting more and more stone together to create what was nominally limestone more dense than anything else Aby had ever encountered, or the wealth of mana it had spent further bolstering the material. Damaging its walls, floors, and ceilings was no easy task, and Aby had seen all manner of spells and abilities alike fail to do more than superficially scald, scrape, or sizzle the rock.
The drake had managed to punch craters into it with brute force alone, and there was one patch of wall that looked to have outright exploded from the force of something hitting it, probably an elemental crystal if the shards embedded were any indication. The core would bet that was also the result of its hulking reptile doing something ridiculous.
Aby was worried about him, more than ever now, but it also wanted to see what came next. It didn’t want to lose him, just as it couldn’t bear losing the wyvern and all the strength- both real and potential- they represented, nor did the idea of Sela having to grieve such important creatures sit right at all. Thankfully, both seemed to be at least stable, and so Aby could move on to other projects.
Or, as it had resolved to do, it could tamp down on that drifting attention, and keep a larger portion of its mind focused on them more often now, as well as the other big successes. It certainly had mind to spare, and it needed to act on that while it had the time to act freely as ruler of its own slice of the world. It had no idea how long it had before the invaders inevitably returned.
More than that, though, it knew that some invaders could not be allowed to live, because they always came back, or helped other outsiders come back even worse. Some things were unforgivable, and having things from other dungeons crawl over themselves just to take mana it didn’t want, to ruin its work, threaten its creatures, threaten Sela, and cap it off with shoving anathema into its very halls with vile biped things that were all too eager to die the fools they lived as was without any doubt, unforgivable.
But it knew how to deal with them, things that needed air like its kobolds did not too long ago. It knew how to recognize the scaleless mistakes that brought filth and bipedal blights as things to not scare or drive away, since they’d just figure out how to make things worse next time. The entire domain soon knew how to as well; invaders couldn’t be allowed anyway but special care would be taken to end anyone who might bring about a second War. It just didn’t want to be bothered at all, not by things that couldn’t even give it templates and only took and took.
All it wanted to do was to grow, and to watch its creations grow with it, but since the surface things- all mercenaries and Adventurers- kept pushing, it’d have to get harder to push. For all of a brief moment, the idea of pushing back flitted through its mind, all of it; how easy it would be to send its spawn out with nothing but the thought of revenge and spite to drive them on. It could dig deeper, faster, and stop caring about the song and dance its instincts demanded and its annoyances preyed on, all while creating wave after wave of deterrence to strike back.
On some level, the idea appealed to it, appealed to it greatly even, and it started winding and coiling its mana in the shapes it would need to create legions, preparing orders to give newspawn before they were sent freely to terrorize as it had been. But then it watched Sela, back pressed against the slumbering form of its wyvern, watching the ribbon dance of the enigmatic new elemental, and it realized how bad an idea that’d be.
The faint, fracturous tinkling it’d heard in its core finally died out, the itchy tingling it hadn’t known tickled it faded away, and it let the half-formed mana constructs disperse back into the waters. To create life, only to send it away the next instant wasn’t what it wanted, it already reaffirmed what it did want just moments earlier. Giving that up just for some petty, pointless revenge would gain it nothing, the surface would never give it anything and it wouldn’t let the outside pull it out of its domain.
Still, not wanting anything to do with them wouldn’t be enough to not get entangled all the same, so it would prepare instead. Its halls, the tiny slice of the plane that was well and truly its own, could stand to be less tiny, less chaotic and disorganized. There wasn’t any inborn urge to wait anymore, which meant it could not just organize, but grow, and after all it had gone through, growth was long overdue.
The first thing that it realized was that it was being a bit childish before, there wasn’t any reason to build down, layer by layer, stacked in some neat, tidy path straight to its core. Of course it had varied it up, but it still called everything floors, still made every path forward end at its core. It only had to chew on the short, shallow memories of the core so crudely brought against it to realize where something so linear would inevitably end.
All it took was a simple thought, one that it sent outwards to every thought-capable entity in the dungeon, and even to a few of those that couldn’t. It consolidated the many strings of thought it had going into a more solid few, and spread its influence over the whole of its creation. It had a general shape, an idea for what it wanted to do, to make caverns larger than anything it had done yet, by smashing the space it did have into more consolidated wholes.
There wouldn’t be one single, branching path down anymore, instead it would rip open huge pockets, each large enough to dwarf the colossal arenas it had made before, and feed the myriad biomes it had cultivated into one large biosphere for each. In just a moment, the water shuddered, and the rock itself flowed like mud, but unlike its last reshapings, there was hardly a noise. No earshattering crack of fractured rock or riotous booms of displaced earth, just hundreds of tons of magically hardened limestone bending to the will of a greater power.
Everything in the domain watched, even the plants and corals throughout the halls seemed subdued as they were gently pulled into their new places, while creatures great and small let themselves be carried on the guiding currents. The floors it had made up to that point were closed up, or reshaped, combined into ever larger caverns, six enormous superstructures breaking off from a central shaft just a few meters below its entrance, reminding Aby almost of the petals of a flower, if each petal was wildly different from the others.
Each was connected mildly to the rest by a webbing of hidden tunnels, covered by various coral and crystal and plant and breakaway walls, but they were largely separate, all but one of them led to a dead-end, rather than its precious core room. The first was the subaquatic shoreline, a single oblong arena of blue and yellow sand painting together in waves and spirals, leaving the ground to ebb and flow along with the dancing spirits of water that controlled its tide. The drake, of course, kept his nest in the very center, where the sand was dry and the crystals almost as numerous as those grains.
The kobolds, meanwhile, had a maze of tunnels carved along the walls, some staying levels, others plunging downwards to meet other floors or uncharted territory. They were connected, loosely, to the drake’s arena, but would likely only use it as a staging ground for their raids in the other territories. Part of the reason why was the crescent grove of rust-colored plants that separated the tunnels from the open space. The Mangling Grove, as Aby had taken to calling the bloodthirsty mangal that had dominated the once-eighteenth floor, was present and even eager to be given some new territory to work with.
The next territory was one it was deeply familiar with, and owed everything it had accomplished to. It wasn’t anything special, when compared to most of its other creations, but the humble baseline mana reef it was born in was where it all began, the only environment it ever knew was one steeped with enough mana to Burn anything not meant to be there. For the more mundane reef, it was built like a long, slow spiral downwards, taking hundreds of meters in a roughly single, albeit labyrinthine cave that got ever wider towards the bottom, where it ended in a few pockets.
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The entire way down was lined with coral, every type and color and flavor represented, growing out of the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the hidden pockets in the limestone, leaving the area looking more like a neverending mosaic. The colors, shapes, sizes of life squirreled away in the nooks and crannies only made it all the more disorienting, and as one approached the bottom and found the walls getting further away, they’d find that the life only got larger to match the space. There wasn’t much air to be found in this, or most other passages, but Aby hardly cared about how the scarcity of such a precious resource would affect any unwelcome guests, while those that it deemed actually deserving of the lifegiving gas would find plenty of it, if they knew where to look.
The kobolds and drake-kin of a more aquatic nature were likely to move in to some of the more spacious crevices among the coral and caves, where the corals were multiple meters, even tens of meters, in height, width, diameter, and so on. The crystals jutting out of the rock only grew in size along with the massive mana batteries, some so big they dwarfed even the sharks that patrolled the very deepest chamber of the reef.
Next to receive its abundant attention was the open seas portion, an otherwise neglected area of its domain that, unfortunately, seemed to remain so. The hollow was massive, true, managing to have a diameter of tens of kilometers and a height of dozens of meters, but it was necessarily barren, with little animal life and even less animal. Aby kept it, in hopes that one day it might get some life more appropriate than the dolphins and swordfish and baitballs and sharks to populate it, but as it was, it served as little more than a diversion, still crazily charged with the overwhelming amount of water mana Aby had dragged through it but also still nearly as empty as the truly open ocean
At the very least, the now-roaming water elemental seemed to appreciate the straightforward, simple presentation, and came to dance in the center of the massive room much like how its lesser undine cousins moved through the more shallow floors. The core made note that its elemental was a bit less lively than it had when Sela granted it an audience, before moving on to the next project.
It had to be even more gentle this time; even though the wyvern was awake and by all measures just as capable as before his injury while being given Aby’s healing mana, the core was still irrationally worried about somehow messing that up, and losing one of its most precious spawn. If that weren’t enough, then the presence of Sela, still calmly resting against him atop his spirit coral perch was even more incentive not to mess things up.
It decided not to change too much for the floor of steam and heat. It was already one of its largest single areas, after collapsing three floors into a single whole, so instead, it chose to just build off of that, smoothing out some of the jagged breaks in the stone, making the shape more natural, if still somewhat resembling a messy cone. It made it less of a single space this time, though, instead having a few wide, large shelves jutting out from the walls as one descended. Roughly one hundred meters beneath the boiling, frothing surface and at the very center of the room rested the wyvern’s spirit coral, now itself nearly ten meters tall and with branches almost that long.
The heat it put out only grew more intense, and there was a clearing around it where all other coral were bleached dead or burnt to nothing, and the wyvern’s own stash of crystals exaggerated it yet further. Meanwhile, as one climbed up the steps and shelves Aby designed, the heat cooled somewhat. It was still well and truly boiling even at the top, but it was also just water, unlike at the bottom, where heat and steam mana was so dense the water turned an angry pink.
Instead, the dominant color at the top was a calm, deep blue. The flagship had given up on pursuing the wyvern, thankfully, and had instead focused on expanding its own forces at the top of the room. It’s cerulean tendrils had stained everything from the surface to nearly thirty meters deep, and there were veins of expanse that crawled even deeper down in places. The central intelligence, its main body, sat somehow motionlessly in the very center of the room, mindbreaking tendrils dangling down tens of meters on their own, and all the life in their grasp had already been claimed, puppet bodies of a single mind.
Aby prodded at it with feelings of approval, eager to see how it would grow, and pleased that it didn't need to erase it for threatening its bond those many months ago. It still wasn’t entirely sure if the being could understand or even receive its feelings in the same way its other creations could, but it felt the alien mind shudder at its mental touch, mirrored in a slight wavering in all of its many bodies.
Next on the agenda was its first, and so far only personal biome, the arctic atoll. It was underdeveloped, Aby regretted, and it realized that just being recognized for pushing an environment to its extreme didn’t give it reason to neglect pushing it further. The changes it showed now were proof that it could develop further, for better or for worse, and it wouldn’t let it be such a minor portion of its menagerie any longer. It created a large disc, one that sloped lazily downwards, in sticking with the atoll’s shape. The center remained sparse, but not barren, and small soft corals swayed lazily in the light current, surrounded on all sided by their much larger, hard cousins.
The atoll took on a gradient now, the shallower portions were forcibly reverted to the same sort of delicate, snowy atmosphere they’d had before the core was forced to deal with those invaders, forced to soak the floor in enough mana to ruin the beauty that Sela loved. The waters were still, up there, but as the slope got deeper, the corals were allowed to keep their more molten, jagged, warped shapes, and the glittering dust of rising snow slipped back into the supercooled sludge, sliding towards and piling up at the bottom.
Aby had left the very bottom barren, though it was sure that something might grow in the future, and it had opened up a more direct tunnel between that portion, and the superhot floor. To say that the heat and the cold mixed poorly would be a violent understatement, and the heat blasted through the tunnel eagerly and angrily, geysering towards the ceiling of the icy floor, but flash cooled by it so fast that it reached the surface as a fast-moving swarm of ice chips, erupting into a glittery mess.
It wasn’t constant, either, as sometimes the slush would build up, leaking into the tunnel and cooling enough to solidify and plug the hole, if only temporarily. The heat would swell, erode the temporary wall, until a small hole formed, enough to send the water rocketing back out and up and beginning the cycle again. Arctuross and the knucker weren’t idle, however, and while they didn’t seem to hate the connection, they acted any time it grew especially riotous. A wave of a webbed hand would send jagged chunks of opaque ice to fill the connection, for a bit of peace, or sometimes a frosty, reptilian glare would result in a crystalline wall hardening from nothing, maintained by the former-eel’s magic and pride.
The rest of the populace seemed to adapt easily enough, and the grim trophies of the snowflake snapper remained floating atop the waves, breaking apart or giving way to other chunks of ice. That only left the last portion of its redecoration, the other half of its very own Name and the portion it decided to name itself. The Abyssal Reef Dungeon needed to do its abyssal reef biome justice, and even if it hadn’t been recognized as a personal biome yet, it would never even consider the deep, dark reef as anything but its own property.
The depths reached downwards like a grasping, bulbous hand. Large arenas gave way to snaking caverns, only to connect at another wide open space and branch out further. The chambers only got larger as they got deeper, and while some of the pits and paths dead-ended, others only led deeper. Humboldt squid flashed in the darkness of some of the larger chambers, and lanternfish and glowing snakes lit up the empty space up high, but the light grew dimmer with every jump down.
Part of it was the presence of dark mana corals, of course, and as they grew so did their output, to the point where they clawed and gobbled up the light before it could ever be seen, but more still were the predators that roamed about. Snakes would take any opportunity to strike out at prey that dared let itself be seen, and were equally zealous in exterminating the life that was smart enough to hide. Mimic octopodes were snatched out of their hiding spots, killed outright if they were lucky.
If not, they were paralized, then consumed by the larger specimen, unable to even dissolve into corpse-light so long as they were being digested. More daring fish were struck, eaten, or taken deeper still, to the very largest chamber. There, they’d be tribute to the wyrm, all twenty-five meters of scale, muscle, and teeth built for devouring. Her miasma made the room seem even darker than all the ones leading up to it, and even though it was laden with mana and toxic enough to scour the coral to nothingness and actively curse any creature that didn’t die from sheer toxicity, the serpents thrived in the environment, that very same curse instead being a boon on any that the wyrm recognized as her subjects.
She looked around her new, greatly enlarged room with satisfaction, before finding the cove specially made for her and curling up. Even though light was nothing more than a fantasy to anything this deep, nothing could fail to see her amber eyes as they looked out over her queendom.
The serpents weren’t the only danger to prowl about, though, they weren’t even the only danger that slithered about. The Abyssal stars were all too eager to see their own territory grow as it did, as well as to see a few errant stars Aby had created separate from them. The Abyssal Slime Star and the Abyssal Leather Star were welcomed into the collective with quite literal open arms. Many, many arms. They roamed freely and eagerly now, no longer constrained by being bosses of just one floor after Aby realized that floors needn’t be so strictly defined in the first place.
Accompanying them, and doing so with the sheer joy that bled out into Aby, was Carmine. Seeing two new stars join her favored companions was like a gift to her, and they were swiftly met with the same sort of overwhelming affection that the other four had grown to love or, in the case of the chimeric star, tolerate. They hadn’t lasted long under her coos and caress, either.
Lastly, and at the very deepest chamber, if one only slightly smaller than the wyrm’s own, was the haunt of the doppelgänger. The enigmatic creature seemed only too eager to watch the walls and water around it change, so excited that it lost control of its own form, and was still trying to consolidate into any one shape. Tentacles grew and were devoured by their own snake-headed neighbors, fins sprouted into fingered heads, teeth and eyes bubbled to its surface in a display of form Aby couldn’t help but admire.
The only constant through it all was the presence of at least a tuft of marble white fur. Finally, it seemed to calm down, taking a shape loosely reminiscent of a fish, if with a few more scaly hands than strictly normal. It swam about far too gracefully for its chosen shape, and the fur should have provided far more drag than it seemed to, but Aby had long stopped questioning its efficacy, and even if it had failed to kill the only invader it had ever encountered, it still did more to the rat man thing than anything else, so it more than earned the core’s approval.
On the subject of the core, Aby was itself just beneath the doppelgänger’s floor, core room off to one side and now covered by crystals and corals just as densely packed as the rest of the arena. It kept its shrimp guard, of course, knowing that in the absolute worst case it could sacrifice hundreds of the crustaceans for one single, immense attack. The core would survive, of course, physics alone was no longer enough to damage it and only something else’s mana could hope to so much as scratch it, but Aby was beyond reluctant to let Sela’s carefully tended garden be annihilated so easily.
But hopefully it would never again come close to that point, especially with the dungeon being much more difficult to navigate. It was pleased with its new size, and the core itself had grown by six centimeters to reflect the added space. If that weren’t enough to spark contentment, then, as if summoned by its thoughts, Sela chose that point to start wandering back to their core room. It patiently led her through the new series of tunnels, and when she finally popped out in the soft blue-grey light of their core, it finally felt content.
She spent a minute checking over the coral, and Aby was proud it had grown enough to even recognize she was doing it playfully and knew that it would never ruin her hard work like that. After an exaggerated nod, she swam up, and laid down on the gemstone, humming merrily as her three Undine alighted around her hand. She traced the faint lines carved into its surface that depicted its three bosses, each shimmering ethereally around her.
For the first time since it woke up, it felt safe, and it felt content, and Aby hoped that that could last forever.