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The Drifting Dungeon
Arc Three - The Plateau of Storms: Chapter Forty

Arc Three - The Plateau of Storms: Chapter Forty

As the storm fully dissipated, the child began exploring their new area.

The current was not fast, more like a lazy stream, which was strange since the storm had only just ended, but it suited the child's needs.

They couldn't see any signs of land as they looked around, but when they looked down at the ocean floor, they could see the bottom. From what they could tell, the bottom was about 100 metres down, and when they started looking further towards the north, just a bit from where they were slowly floating, they could see a steep drop in the ocean floor. But everywhere else they looked seemed to keep to being around 100 metres deep.

And that was not the only thing. As the child looked, they noticed more and more life within this area of the risen ocean floor, a plateau of sorts.

The child did not know how long they would be in this area, but they knew that if they could get their territory down to the ocean floor, they could gain a lot of new species.

But before they could do anything, they had to release their territory-dwelling creatures and ensure their first floor survived the storm.

Opening up the two rooms, the animals held within rushed out and got acquainted with the new area. They didn't close the rooms, leaving only a small portion open for the fish that did not so much like the open ocean. To make the room a better environment and not so empty, they grabbed some of the blade kelp and populated the room with it.

After releasing the animals that they put into rooms, the child checked on the first floor. It was slightly banged up, but everything survived, and they fixed the damaged things.

The first thing on the child's to-do list was to expand their territory downwards.

It was slow going, but after a day of fully concentrating on it, they managed to increase their territory by 23 metres. Making their territory 67 metres tall, with their territory being 53 metres tall from the water level down.

This did not mean that they couldn't gain any new species just because they couldn't reach the bottom.

All of the krill, snails, and fish swimming around in their territory seemed to be attracting attention from the more predatory fish around them. They had already managed to gain three new species of fish.

The first fish species that they gained was a large silver fish. Tapering spindle-shaped and compressed for speed, this species is a metre in length and is bony with large silver scales. They decided to call them the "Silver Spindle."

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The second fish species was more predatory-looking. The fish was just over a metre in length and had an elongated body with a jaw of long, sharp teeth. This ravenous fish, who immediately went to consume as many fish in their territory as they could, had silvery sides and bluish backs. So the child decided to call them the "Blue Wolf Herring."

The last fish was a shoal species, and the child grabbed many of them when they entered their territory. The fish are 30 centimetres long and seem to use their scales to communicate with each other. The majority of the scales are silver, but there are a few scales that repeatedly change to bright, different colours. As a school of fish, these colours made up complex flashing patterns. Due to the changing of scale colours to communicate, the child called them the "Silver Signal Minnows."

As their new inhabitants wandered around their territory, the child turned their attention inwards towards all of the things that they grabbed from the chamber underneath their five island locations.

The first thing they did was to pull out the hibernating mana string from the black stone and wrap it in their mana.

Hopefully, this works, thought the child as they wrapped their own mana string around the hibernating one like they have done to make other mana strings their own. And hopefully, this would both wake up the mana string and make it their own.

As their mana string was wrapped and attached to the dull red mana string, the child put as much of their golden flecks as possible into the string that flowed into the dull red string.

The string quickly became theirs, but it was still dull and hibernating.

After about thirty minutes of doing this, the red mana string slowly turned into a bright orange colour, and the child could feel the mana string waking up.

As the string woke up, the child could feel an intense heat coming from the string. Far more potent than the heat mana string, something that was far more powerful than anything they had seen.

Curious, the child dragged the bright orange string barely to the edge of the fifth floor before the water started boiling in seconds. With the boiling, a large amount of steam came out of the water, and the child quickly pulled it out so that it didn't damage or kill any of their plants, animals, or monsters in the area.

They pulled the string and placed it back into the original smooth black stone and watched as the string began to melt the rock into a dull red, then bright orange and red colour. Then, the name for this mana string flowed from their core to their body.

Magma string.

Their core called it this, and it certainly fits what it did.

The child pulled the string and let it float around the small room. This was when the child turned their attention to the three plants and animals and the eggs that they found within the black stone that the child presumed was cooled magma.

The first insect has two ovals making up its body, six legs with two clawed toes and antennae, and the bottom oval is transparent with a clear liquid with a two-millimetre magma mana string glowing inside the liquid. The child decided to call this insect the "Boiling Wingless Cricket."

The second insect was very different from the first one. While the first one was made for speed and jumping, the second was made for ambushes. It had a rounded half-circle body, with six legs and red markings surrounding large sharp mandibles that helped the insect direct the magma that they spat. They decided to call this the "Magma Spitting Beetle."

The plant, though, was tiny. Absolutely tiny. Only about ten centimetres long with flowers two centimetres wide, this flower had a dark red, almost brownish-orange stem and leaves with all the flower petals being transparent except for one, the lip. The lip of the flower had these glowing orange veins signifying that there was a bit of a magma mana string in the plant. So the child decided to call this orchid the "Glowing Orchid."

Once they had named and categorised their findings from, what they can now assume as a cooled magma chamber, the child continued pushing their territory downwards, but they also began working on their sixth floor.