Izzis was sulking. Having lost the mental struggle to control the Contract, he had also lost his chance to live like a prince at my expense. Instead, I had him catching rats. He would capture them, drag them into my territory, and kill them. It provided a steady supplement to my Mana supply. It also made him miserable. I was entirely fine with this.

And then it started to rain.

A fine drizzle rattled down, slowly swelling the wide and lazy river that ran through the underground tunnels and culverts. My floodwater outlet was beginning to see a steady trickle. It filled up the irrigation trenches I had dug in my garden, the ponds and pools.

With the waters starting to rise, the local wildlife was slithering into the nooks and crannies of the sewer. I called Izzis back, allowing him to return to his favorite hobby, weaving a little nest for himself out of mushroom stalks.

By midday it was clear we were in for a storm. From the outlet at the far east end of my domain, I could hear the thunder crash and the rain splatter down. The whole city was battening down the hatches.

Meanwhile, Argent had become a leader. Rounding up all the other white rats I had created, she led them through the obstacle course I had built for her. Rodents scrambled across balance beams, squeezed between bars, jumped from post to post to collect golden trinkets and then turned back, returning to the beginning to trade their prize for a tasty snippet of meat I conjured.

We were training an army.

Aurum slept soundly, the rise and fall of his back as he breathed a constant slow ripple of motion in the stillness of my hidden lair.

As for me, I spent this lazy rain day working. First, one my explosive blooms. The ground sprouted up with tiny, bulbous fungal sprouts, swelling until they burst in a spray of chitin shrapnel. I wasn’t above having a few of them ‘happen’ to sprout by Izzis’ nest, making the little gremlin jump in fright. Serves him right.

But eventually I tired of amusing myself at his expense. And amusing is all the explosive fungi were turning out to be. I could neither grow them fast enough to be a viable attack or get them to wait until something moved nearby to detonate, ruling out planting them as a trap.

I spun webs like I had on my very first day, netting the river. Fish and creatures caught by the rushing waters fell into my hands, Izzis picking them off from the shore with a little spear he’d made. A nice way to make some Mana, although sadly, none of the junk that washed into my grasp included jewels.

As the rain pattered and tapped, I turned to making a new Core.

I had the emerald, and once I’d filled it up with Mana I began toiling to convert it to a new Shard. I knew my last one had been crude work at best. This time I moved slowly, deliberately.

I formed the core of the energy within the jewel using all my mental strength, compressing the Mana within to its limit, until it burst into a pale flame that flickered and danced in an invisible wind. Then I began to bind it in place with an orbital ring of new energy, focusing on getting the Mana to flow smoothly and quickly in a kind of looping river that contained the burning core energy. But for the final touch, I’d had to look inward.

My own core was similar - a tiny, fingernail sized rift that poured an endless stream of Mana into the world, surrounded by five golden circles of runes. Those runes made all the difference.

Most of these runes I didn’t understand and wouldn’t meddle with, but each time I had taken an Attunement, new letters had appeared. It was these I was attempting to copy into my creation. Since they were associated with Attunement, I hoped to use them to copy that Attunement into my monsters.

The process of engraving, however, was a vicious struggle. I had to maintain most of my focus on compressing the core energy, while steadily slowing the flow of the outer ring enough to carve symbols onto its face, splitting my attention into three. Two times I had made a slip, and both had manifested in sudden cracks breaking the surface of the emerald. One more and it was likely to split apart entirely.

All my attention was given to that single task. As I etched the final curl of a looping, arcane letter into the emerald, I let out a mental sigh of relief. I allowed my senses to return to the outside world-

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And found that my little kingdom was in chaos.

Argent was shaking me in her paws, trying to get me to ‘wake up’. Izzis was huddled into the alcove with her, and even Aurum was awake, gazing at me with concerned eyes.

The fungal gardens were flooding.

Rushing, frothing white water was pouring in through the flood tunnel, overflowing the channels and pools I’d dug and rushing over the roots of the mushrooms, sweeping away croaking bullfrogs as they fought each other for the few islands of high ground remaining.

The tunnels I had dug underneath the gardens to flood and turn into an underwater labyrinth were taking the bulk of it, acting as a drain, but there was only so much space and the water was still coming in.

I did the only thing I could, and tried to seal off the floodwater tunnel. The sheer weight of the river pouring through tore the stone away nearly as fast as I could build it out, but bit by bit, I assembled a dam, lifting up a curtain of stone to block off the flood.

My gardens were mud and ruins by the time I had it done. The mushrooms had been torn from their roots and upturned, or swept away entirely, leaving ground a morass of sucking mud. Much of my population was gone.

And behind the floodwall, the waters were still building. I hastily dug trenches, expanding the tunnels beneath the garden with deep wells that I cut into the still-soft earth.

I also opened up several very thin tunnels branching out from the central shaft of my Sanctum, ending them in ‘bottles’ - small chambers lined with moss and water meant to keep specimens alive. I populated them with every kind of creature within my territory, quickly assembling an arc.

And for minutes, then hours, I waited.

The dam held strong at first. I cut a spillway near the base, allowing a steady but constrained flow of water to pour through. It ran into the tunnels beneath the garden and slowly turned them into a murky, muddy labyrinth. Better yet the entrance would look like nothing more than a deep pond.

But I was concerned. As fast as I could dig through loose soil, dissolving new wells to catch the rushing waters, I couldn’t dig faster than a flood. Ever so slowly, my dam was beginning to bend. Tiny rivulets ran down the stone face. A steady groaning filled the lair.

Argent was next to me. Izzis paced at the edges of the alcove. Aurum tried to sleep, but I could catch him slowly cracking his eyes open to survey the situation. I tried to send calm waves of mental energy to all of them, but I had none to spare.

I was a Dungeon Core. I couldn’t help but see every facet of my domain. I had no way to tune out the groan, groan, crack of the dam giving way.

And then all it once it broke. A wave of cold, seething floodwater smashed through the garden, tearing up the last of my crop, frogs letting out a last desperate ribbit in the instant before they were washed away and everything was drowned.

Everything was lost beneath high, dark waters.

I watched the water fill the tunnels I had dug beneath, and slowly wash up, rising into the base of the Sanctum. Minute by minute, I watched it climb. I would survive.

Argent and Aurum would not.

I desperately began to dig. To widen the outflow pipe at the far end of my domain, through which white waters were cascading into the lake below. I ate away at the stone as fast as I could, hoping to let the flood out faster than it came in, but it was no use. The brickwork was solid and resistant to my efforts.

The waters were rising.

I watched as rat carcasses, blind fat fish, rusting bits of metal and scraps of bone, garbage from the sewers, clods of mud, rotten apples and fishguts all sailed through the river that filled the floodwater passage to the top of the ceiling.

A last ditch inspiration struck me. I consumed everything. I ate the last of my fungus crop that had hidden itself beneath the earth, I ate and ate until I had enough Mana to at least give a last ditch effort.

I consumed a blackened apple seeds and all, and planted one in the dirt beneath the outflow grate.

Then I poured my mana into it. All of it. At once.

The seed split open under the deluge of life, sending feelers of green through dirt and stone, anchoring itself as a single sprout began to rise. And swell. And grow.

It was like watching a river of timber pour up from the earth, thickening into the base of an enormous tree, its wriggling roots cracking open the stone. It split at its top into branches that pressed into the roof, pushing out with growing, immense pressure.

Until the stone gave way and split open and the entire wall was torn apart, the tree rising through.

Outside of the sewer there was a little lake where the overflow ran out. A lake overlooked by a tall brick wall, part of the city above’s foundation. That wall bulged out and splintered open, brickdust and rubble raining down as a tree reached its green branches through and spread out a crown of leaves. Its roots hung over the breach in the walls, white water cascading past its mighty trunk.

And within my little lair, the waters fell. They sank away just before they reached the top of my Sanctum, sliding back down as the flood found a new, easier route to take, sloshing out into the lake.

Cold air blew in from the hole I had just breached in my Dungeon.