Blue Core

I watched through Shayma’s eyes while I worked. The city was crowded, the other-dungeon raised all my nonexistent hackles, and her friends seemed pleasant enough. I wasn’t sure how precarious their position actually was, but both Shayma and the little antlered Queen seemed serious enough as they debated the merits of fleeing the city.

Which meant I’d have to be ready for them.

I had an excessive amount of space now, and enough time Altering the furniture I put down (along with the free advances provided by levelups) had combined with a maxed Camouflage to become Customization. Which was an entirely different level of skill.

[Customization]: Combines [Alteration] and [Camouflage]. Any Dungeon Feature may be molded, shaped, and colored to any degree that does not sacrifice its integrity. Any alteration or set of alterations may be saved for later placement.

It was quick, too. Easy. Even without mana I could sweep through a dungeon hall and texture the floor, polish the walls, etch patterns and figures. With, I could rework all the countless square meters in a matter of minutes. I even managed a faux sky that mimicked the outside over the garden lake. Which, itself, I sunk far deeper into the earth, leaving a shielding complex of tunnels up top in case anyone else came by.

Now that I knew I could spend mana on skills, it wasn’t difficult to make the magma and ice needed for the other chrystheniums, and it turned out the flowers maintained that temperature, once you got enough of them. So a lake of lava, spotted with red petals, and a cavern of ice, covered in blue, were enough to accelerate my income of mana and magma and ice.

Interestingly, I could put them side by side, and so long as there was a doorway between them, open or closed, the heat and the cold didn’t spill over. Not that I should have been surprised; I was already violating several laws of physics, magic or no magic. But it was still strange.

The primary thing I was after though, was storage. I had consumed most of my spare stone, but I still had so many resources that were straining their maximums and often no good way to store them. Like biomass, or mana. The latter, especially, didn’t seem to be something I could simply fill a room with and be done.

It took almost a solid week of experimentation, even as I reworked my internals to account for a possible influx of people. I stuffed mana into tiny stone boxes, compressed whiffs of outgassed vapor with Alteration, smashed bits and pieces of mana together at whatever speeds I could muster. But eventually the overlay gifted me with the result.

[Storage Crystal]: Provides external storage of non-inventory resources.

The small version, storing twenty-five of anything, took one hundred Stone, ten Iron, one Gold, and one hundred Mana. A few extra levels into them with my banked experience and I had access to larger versions, each taking a single gold but scaling up with the remainder of the resource cost.

So I was only limited by gold. Now that I had red Chrystheniums, I had an infinite, if slow-growing, source of iron too. Treasure sense showed me no gold nearby, which wasn’t surprising. Gold didn’t just randomly appear. It was in pockets with certain geologies around it, and I wasn’t sure if it was found in the same place as iron and copper ore. Actually I didn’t even know if it made sense for iron and copper to be near each other like that.

Therefore I delved deeper into the cave system, sending runners along something that was probably an ancient magma tube. It was maybe thirty meters in diameter, spreading out and down into the mountain roots. At least, for a while.

Until something started to come up from the tunnels.

I really should have expected that. In a world of monsters and magic of course there were Things

living in the depths. But the pack of giant clawed moles suddenly scrambling into my exploratory tunnels still caught me by surprise.

Level 18 Emmoil

Level 12 Emmoil

Level 15 Emmoil

…

Level 25 Emmoil Pack Leader

There were a dozen of them, clawing upward as if on the scent of something. I didn’t have anything against them in particular, but I really didn’t want them scrabbling around in my tunnels so I hastily shoved a door in their way.

They simply dug through it.

The feeling of claws scraping through my door was not pleasant, though not as sickeningly awful as a dungeon wall, but apparently I’d need a wall. The door gave me enough time to grow a Hardened Stone barrier behind it, but soon enough the Emmoils were digging through that too. Which seemed unfair.

A closer look at their stat sheet showed they had the [Stone Shaping] ability, which apparently simply bypassed my stone’s toughness. So I was tempted to just let them run around until they got bored, until I noticed what turns they were taking. They were headed right for my core.

I threw a hallway full of traps at them without even thinking about it. Even though I hadn’t spent much experience on upgrading them, the leveling bonuses were enough to put them into fairly dangerous territory. Enormous spears, deadly scythes, camouflaged pit traps, spiked balls, and all that sort of thing. The Emmoils started dying.

Level 18 Emmoil killed. 180 experience granted.

Level 12 Emmoil killed. 120 experience granted.

Level 15 Emmoil killed. 150 experience granted.

…

Level 25 Emmoil Pack Leader killed. 250 experience granted.

That was...odd. They didn’t break or scatter from the traps, or even try a different corridor. They just swarmed single-mindedly into death. Upon consideration, that was a lot scarier than if they’d been smart, because that kind of behavior couldn’t possibly be natural, even for a magical monster. They were being controlled somehow. And it was entirely possible the controller knew I was here.

Spasmodic, spontaneous panic gave way to to the quieter, more considered kind. It wasn’t like I was exactly secret, not since I’d given Shayma license to go invite people over. But that was a different thing entirely from someone who controlled monsters and sent them after either me specifically or what I was in general. And as much as I wanted to, pulling back wouldn’t do me any favors.

I couldn’t exactly run away. Hiding went only so far, since apparently those things could sniff out mana or whatever from quite a distance. So the best defense against them was the exact opposite of hiding: spread out as far as I could, to give myself as much time as possible to stop or deflect whatever would come for me.

Surface area was working for me now, with hundreds of boring tendrils expanding my volume and allowing me to extend deep under the mountains. The areas meant for eventual habitation stayed near the surface, but the deeper levels gave me plenty of room for farms and lava and ice.

Size requirements for level increase met.

Dungeon Level increases by 1.

Skill base levels increase by 1.

At least I was getting more storage space. The skill-ups were fine, but I hadn’t seen the need to advance anything I had past a few thousand experience worth of ranks. Though I could see how at, say, level ten it would be nice to instantly advance to the next rank whenever I got to a new skill.

No new Emmoils came, and eventually my Treasure Sense showed a lot of gold nearby. And silver. And gems? Some sort of cache, buried in the mountain? Though I seemed to remember gold and silver were found in the same spot. Regardless, it was worth going for, so I called my remaining boring beetles and quickly carved a tunnel toward the deposit. Runners of plain rock wall went along behind, so I could see the exact moment when they broke through. It wasn’t a vein, or some vault within the mountain. It was a massive cave, lit with cold blue, and an enormous sprawling hoard of treasures.

And on that hoard was a dragon.

Because of course there was. There were dungeons, there was magic, there were monsters. Clearly there had to be dragons. And large ones.

This particular dragon was a silver-white, stretched out in an undignified catlike sprawl half on the mound of undifferentiated treasure and half over some sort of covering that stretched over half of the cave floor. But the pillow-hoard wasn’t the only treasure around - the lights showed statues, artworks, books, weapons...all kinds of things past the reach of my treasure sense. I was tempted, I admit, but not for long.

I pulled my beetles back and relocated all my boring tendrils. I really didn’t want to intrude on this dragon’s den and I was already uncomfortably close, since I’d taken over all the tunnels. And I’d done so without considering something else might have claimed them. Whoops.

I was preparing to close off the side-tunnel I’d dug that had broken into the wall of the dragon’s cave when one eye opened, slitted pupil fixed on the intrusion. “I see you,” it rumbled.