With careful focus, Archimedes performed one final scan on Anther’s brain. His vein had been relocated, and the mana channel tied to it had followed perfectly. For as far into the future as he could reasonably estimate, the boy’s mind shouldn’t face any side effects besides the ones that had been predicted before the surgery. All was well.
Close it, The dungeon ordered.
Acting as the dungeon’s careful hands, Minute placed the bone puck cut from Anther’s skull back where it belonged, and Archimedes adjusted the spin of the liquid ether nearby to borrow its power in reconnecting the pieces. They fixed the muscle and skin on his scalp the same way. The dungeon was just very careful to keep the ether inside the boy’s head moving slowly, so as not to undo all of their surgical efforts.
He wasn’t sure exactly, but after many beetles had contributed to the cause, Archimedes had formed the hypothesis that ether referenced information stored in the soul when healing a creature. Immediately after a surgical modification, ether would completely revert the change, but after some amount of time had passed (the exact amount varied), ether would heal a creature to its post-surgical state instead.
So it wasn’t like the boy had to forever avoid sticking his head in liquid ether, but they should certainly let his body’s natural healing handle his immediate recovery.
Still, externally, he was without any wounds. Internally, they had done everything they could to ensure there would be no bleeding and as little swelling as possible, and the brain—as an organ that could never have enough space—conveniently lacked nerves to sense pain.
“Looks like it’s finished,” Lilith declared, a split second before the liquid ether disappeared to another hidden tank.
“Finally.” Anther instinctively tried to reach up to touch his head, but the loose straps around his upper arms stopped him.
Minute quietly went to work unfastening the boy from his seat while the dungeon and Deorsa worked together to open the lid of the tank. Thick and sturdy roots formed a lattice that the two could climb out with.
“There were no complications,” Lilith said, standing at a polite distance while Anther’s family hugged and examined him. “It would be best if he stays for a few more days so Archimedes can oversee his recovery. He also has to learn how to control the completed spell formation in his head, and we can help with that.”
“A few more days, right?” Yinether brushed his son’s long hair back and tied it for him, checking gently for injuries and finding none. “Alright.”
The dungeon would be closed for the rest of the week anyway. They would have complete privacy… not that there was ever any privacy in a dungeon. That was rather the point of keeping the boy here for observation.
A small pouch appeared in Anther’s hand, and he lifted it curiously for examination. “What’s this?” he asked, loosening the straps.
“Mints,” Lilith told him as he lifted a small, circular, white tablet out of the bag. “Archimedes noticed that sudden exposure to cold will activate the right parts in your brain to interrupt your passive spellcasting. There’s no way to control the actual temperature outside, but mint produces the perception of cold, and that’s all that’s really needed.”
“Is that why it’s sometimes cold in here?” the boy frowned. He examined the tablet between his fingers curiously and placed it on his tongue. It dissolved quickly, and was strongly mint-flavored. “Cold!” he gasped.
“That’s the point,” Lilith chuckled, and she relished the feeling of laughter she hadn’t felt in a long while. “Archimedes is going to be busy making his next floor, but he’ll still be monitoring you. The rest of us are in charge of warning you for him whenever you need to take one of those. Your job is to learn how to feel the warning signs yourself and to rest. You might feel fine, but your body needs time to heal, so don’t push yourself.”
She herself simply wanted to laze around and play board games after a long morning, but that was exactly what the boy needed.
“I got it,” Anther nodded, stashing the mints in his robes. “They’re too strong though. They make my mouth hurt a little bit.”
He would probably realize the severity of his situation someday soon and start taking things more seriously. The ability to witness the past, effortlessly and without spending one’s own mana, certainly sounded good, but it could also be burdensome if it happened too often or at the wrong time and place. It was involuntary, after all.
After some more hugging and a few happy tears, Anniil and Januiil were secreted away from the dungeon. The two remaining guests and many of the monsters made themselves comfortable, chatting and playing games.
The dungeon’s focus was now on constructing his fourth floor.
***
When Archimedes had announced his temporary closure, he had requested Ulbert to use that time, when he was effectively off duty, to visit the ancient blacklisted dungeons with one of his monsters. His reasoning was the truth but without mentioning any of the nuance: he wanted to establish contact with those dungeons as something like pen pals. They had a lot of similar experiences they could talk about, after all.
Ulbert had already made his intentions clear that he wanted to help Archimedes heal from the past, so he had readily agreed.
“That’s no problem. I can take the chance to visit some friends while I’m in the area. The round trip will take longer than a week, though, and I don’t think your monster will be allowed inside the blacklisted region.”
“That can’t be helped then. Please pass along my greetings and intentions to them.”
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Archimedes didn’t yield, though. He sent Umbra to follow the dungeon researcher back secretly. There were surely things that dungeons as paranoid as them wouldn’t dare to even plant subtly in an outsider’s peripheral vision.
He suspected that the casual chatting waiting to be unearthed in the minds of the dungeon researchers was nothing but a clue toward (and a front to cover) the fact that a more detailed conversation was transpiring using monsters as a medium. That was how he would have gone about things, anyway.
Umbra was already implanted with inquiries about the dungeon wars, the death of Titania, and their unique constructions.
Sadly, their answers would not arrive until after his new floor was built, so if he learned anything special that could be applied to the process, he would have to wait until the next floor to try it.
***
The difficulty a dungeon faced when creating new floors was twofold. First, their cores were barely able to contain enough mana at once to create the spell formation that the process required. Second, those spell formations were difficult beyond reason.
And the complexity only increased as each new floor was added.
But just like how moths endured reducing themselves to biological soup within their cocoons prior to metamorphosis–carrying out a process others would find impossible with nothing but instinct to lead the way–dungeons forged ahead through the gauntlet nature presented them with.
But with time, experience, and a little bit of wisdom, Archimedes was no longer on the same level as an insect following base instinct. He was taking a page out of the books of more intelligent creatures now, like mammals and birds: he was cheating.
In a social environment, cheating was a vice, but in nature, it was the gold standard for success and ingenuity. And frankly, he had no desire to suffer through all the same growing pains from his old life a second time.
The two walls that made expanding so difficult had both been neatly circumvented already.
At three floors deep, the most mana Archimedes could contain within his core at once was exactly enough to progress to the next floor: 40,000 mana… Of course that was like saying a human’s stomach could contain “X” amount of water. It wasn’t comfortable to actually push that limit. It put a burden on his body and focus, and meant he was always constructing the spell formula for expansion in a sub-optimal state. But with the addition of Etherium and Mananite, he could delegate the burden up until the last moment.
And that was far from the only benefit of external mana storage. Same song, different dance, but storing more mana than would have originally been manageable made it possible to evolve dungeon monsters to higher ranks earlier; like Minute.
Dungeon expansion spell formulae were indeed complex and difficult, but they were scaled to a certain standard: the rank of the core.
And the rank of the core was scaled to the dungeon’s highest monster rank. Monster ranks were limited by maximum mana, and maximum mana was originally tied to the number of floors. Disrupting one element threw the entire balance out of order and made things much, much easier.
To put it to scale, building between one and 10 floors was difficult but could be achieved by a dungeon core of any rank. Past ten floors was C-Rank territory, and decidedly beyond the capability of any being not specialized in performing machine-level computations. The hundred level floors could be achieved by a B-Rank dungeon core, and at that point, forget computers, even supercomputers would start having a difficult time.
Building over a thousand floors required an A-Rank core, and even gods would begin to feel intimidated at that point. It was where Archimedes’ previous life had come to a close. The possibilities after ten thousand floors were reserved for S-Rank dungeons only.
Evolving Minute to B-Rank cost Archimedes about ten times what he was now spending to make his fourth floor. There was no way it would have been possible under normal circumstances. Even the fact that he was able to gather so much mana in such a short amount of time was because he had biomes, monsters, and techniques all specialized for it.
He was already set up perfectly to take advantage of Etherium before he even knew it existed.
So, Archimedes was B-Rank now, once again. The frightening spell formations required for floors below a hundred now looked quite reasonable. It would still take time, focus, and care to actually lay them out and activate them—each formula was as big as the entire previous floor, after all—but he was comfortable with multitasking lightly during the process. He could spare some focus thinking of Vow and supervising Anther’s condition. And after a full day of meticulously laying down mana in precise patterns, he activated the formation without a second thought.
Hot pain seared his crystalline core, and a thunderous aching wracked his cavernous body. The growing pains were unfailingly awful every time he did this. In the center of his core, where a portal to the ethereal void rested, invisible energy spilled forth in huge, hot waves, saturating the dungeon. Then the flow reversed, and the void pulled all the energy back toward it. But it wasn’t allowed to escape back to wherever it came from. No, it bore down on his existing core layers and was compressed, heated, forced to undergo an extreme energy reaction that produced almost blinding light–were there anyone currently in the core room to see it. His existing core, all three layers, shrunk as if to escape the utter chaos bearing down on them.
Soon after that, the unbearable heat and pressure subsided, and what rushed in from outside was akin to a cool, soothing wind that eased his core and consciousness. It felt familiar, but in a way he couldn’t describe. Perhaps he only felt that way because of how many times he had already undergone this process. Nevertheless, that relief was gentle, nurturing, and welcome, and suddenly this shell wrapped around his core was part of him.
Despite shrinking, Archimedes’ core was bigger now than before, due to the additional layer, and this one was not a sphere. The fourth floor was the first one where a polyhedral shape could appear instead of just a sphere. Instincts deep within Archimedes pushed him to accept a form with more faces whenever possible, and his centuries of experience agreed. He observed a sharp increase in the ability to perform many distinct simple tasks every time his core gained more faces. This feature wouldn’t help with monolithic endeavors, but it certainly didn’t hurt.
It was such a help when dealing with tedium that Archimedes wished he could increase the number of faces on his core with every single floor… but instinct discouraged him, and without knowing what exactly he was messing with, he considered it best to adhere to the invisible map nature had given him. From what he understood, his new core layers would gain more faces if a regular or isohedral convex polyhedral shape existed with the same number of faces as he had floors. If not, the new layer would be identical to the previous layer.
This fourth layer of his core took the shape of a flawless tetrahedron, a triangular pyramid, orbiting slowly with the first three layers at its center. All the layers of the core actually orbited individually, about various, changing axes, but the process was difficult to observe on perfect spheres.
Ultimately, in the small core room behind the library’s gated door, a spiral staircase opened up in the floor, with a small empty room right at the bottom. The fourth floor had been created. When the dungeon came out of his focus and introspection, several messages were waiting at the front of his consciousness.
[B-Rank dungeon core Archimedes has constructed its fourth floor!]
“Thank you,” he replied warmly.
[Please select a free monster model.]
[Minotaur (D) | Sphinx (B) | Paper Golem (E) | Alraune (C)]