Lucifer flew down the ant's nest and entered the deepest chamber that belonged to the queen. this chamber was nothing like the rest of the nest, the chamber itself looked more man-made than natural. walls consisted of large stones perfectly fitted together to form flat walls with relief carvings depicting unknown stories. Larger ants with obvious mutations that gave them elemental abilities and greater strength patroled the chamber, unlike the ants outside these ones did not carve symbols into their shells leaving them a pristine obsidian black.
In the middle of the room sat the queen, she was obviously much larger than even the mutated ants and she gave off a soft glow of dark light which looked eerie to the eye.
Something seemed off to Lucifer and the feeling only became stronger the closer he came to the ant queen, it seemed like her, but not her at the same time.
He began to closely inspect her and once he approached within a dozen meters she reacted, her mandibles twitched and she began to tremble slightly as she spun around looking for something.
All the guardian ants sensed their queen's agitation and began to search for whatever it was that displeased their queen.
Moments later Lucifer received a packet of emotion over his psychic link to the queen, happiness, excitement, loneliness and sadness along with devotion, so many things were shoved into the small packet that some of them merged together and simply became noise.
Lucifer who was doubting the authenticity of the one in front of him had his doubts dispelled after the message, the ant queen always tried to shove 30 things in something that could only carry 10 even in her messages to him.
He had spoken to her several times over the mental link and found nothing amiss, but she looked so different from the way he made her, she looked like a slightly bigger common ant queen she sometimes gave birth to.
Perhaps she decided to use the energy he gave her to evolve into something that looked more like her children. The more he thought about it the less sense it made, so he decided to just ask her directly instead, "you look different, why?"
Then he remembered that she could not speak and only sent back packets of information containing emotions and regretted asking her. Just as he was preparing to receive another overstuffed message he noticed the black light around her start to ebb and flow.
A gravely distorted voice came from the ant queen, "You gave power to evolve, for me choose, chose this."
Lucifer was initially surprised than relieved that he wouldn't have to decipher noise packets for the rest of the day. he asked "you chose to become a normal queen?, I'm sure the power I gave you earlier was greater in the old form"
After half a minute the queen replied, "had power, undecided, kept power, master sleep, many cycles, old, infertile, can't serve, decided, use power switch bodies, new queen, many times"
While the message was rather bare bones he could understand the idea. Apparently, he had slept longer than he had realized and he started to grow a fondness for this loyal little creature. Then he asked "I don't remember you being able to speak" and the only word he received as the reply was "Lucky".
He found it surprising that Lucky manages to get around as much as she does and even managed to teach an ant basic language, although it did not surprise him the Lucky would enjoy speaking to the queen with her impossible to understand fast-paced emotion packets.
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Then the words "many times" struck him, at first he thought that the queen had only transferred bodies once or "switched bodies" was a bad translation of evolved, but "many times" suggested something different. He asked "did you switch bodies or evolve into a different one to avoid dying of old age"
The queen replied "show", then walked up to one of the guards and the dark light around her wrapped around them both for a moment before the queen fell to the ground unmoving. Then Lucifer felt the queens link with him waver for a moment before it shifted into the ant she had approached.
After a moment the ant looked around before the same dark energy appeared on it and Lucifer heard it say "see, switched" in the queen's voice.
If Lucifer had a jaw it would be dropped at this moment, he had been trying to figure out how to put his consciousness inside a body since he became a dungeon, but his own creation seemed to be able to do it easily.
During the next few hours, Lucifer had the queen switch bodies dozens of times while he watched in every conceivable way he could, he looked at the mana, he looked at the life energy, he looked through thermal vision, however, he tried copying the magic and failed every time. Every time his consciousness started to push into the body of a creature it overloaded and exploded violently.
Although this seemed like a good weapon for him it was not what he needed right now so he could only continue to practice. Only when the floor was covered in ant gore did he give up, he was getting closer to succeeding, the last few corpses were still in one piece. It turns out that copying mages abilities were far simpler because all he had to do was watch the flow of magic in the air weave around and create the same effect, the inherent magic monsters knew looked rather unpredictable to him and he could tell some of the spells was cast inside their bodies which he couldn't see. This made it almost impossible to replicate the effects without understanding the creature casting it with great depth.
With a sigh he gave up for the moment and decided to research it later then asked the said "ah I came here because I wanted the ants to stop digging new floors deeper down and instead dig large caverns near the surface, also make sure to not let the caverns cave in, the rock walls are enhanced with magic but that doesn't make them indestructible.
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After showing the ants where he wanted the new floors he felt an annoying feeling gnawing on the back of his mind. He soon found himself on the sixth floor again and he thought 'It seems this floors "incompleteness" is still bugging me'.
He flew around the floor while thinking of what he could add and said "hi" to cuddles while pass in hopes it would learn to talk at some point too.
'fuck it' he thought and he started modifying one of the fish. First he looked at their teeth and turned them up to 11, so now they were sharp jagged and almost as tall as the fish itself, second he increased its size to more than 3 metres in size, thirdly he grew a small stem on its head and added a small amount of light attribute to a bulb that grew at the end of it. 'now it won't only be people who are fishing in these waters hue hue' Lucifer chuckled.
Satisfied with his work he let the fish swim away to create more nightmare babies with whatever it could find, and hopefully, it did not end up too weird, some of his creations had to be put down that way.
Lastly, he skipped through his Earth-mails and simply created a shark-like creature. It seemed rather unimaginative to him but that seemed fine, the only thing he modified on them was darkening their upwards facing skin so they were harder to spot when they were beneath you, then increased the toughness of said skin.
'hmm,' he thought. 'something seems missing'. After a moment he realized that he increased the danger on this floor significantly but did not increase the rewards that much.
So he added several glowing plants that thrived underwater to the sea-floor and created several mineral crystals on the floor, these crystals grew a material he had recently received in an Earth-mail. it glowed a faint blue and seemed to absorbed fire according to the Earth-mails and was later confirmed by him. This should raise the value of the floor enough that people brave the dangerous monster Cuddles.