Dungeon Core Chat Room.

There were also 11 "simpler" panels – one for each floor. These panels did not follow him around as he checked stuff instead hovering in a circle around where he first started streaming.

Okay, I can drag these around and put them in different areas. Then if I use this option…

Playing around a bit Innearth tried sharing for a few seconds.

Abe: Ey! Mah man! You're tier 5! How's it feel catching up with your big bro? Feels pretty good up here huh.

Abe: Is this your dungeon? It's…interesting.

Innearth: First off that was quick. How fast were you finding and joining the stream? Also, obligatory thanks…and finally I'm expanding into these hallways don't judge they aren't my actual dungeon. I'll finish this up and then you can see what I have with everyone else.

Abe: Okay bro but hear me out. We besties right? What about a secret pre-tour. I won't tell the others.

Innearth: ...listen I'm busy setting stuff up I don't want to share my dungeon before I have everything I was planning on showing off done.

Innearth: But I am exploring a new area so let me play around a bit more with the controls and then you can watch the expansion into a new area. Just don't expect too much...Like shave off 1% of your attention to watch the stream it's probably not too exciting.

Stolen novel; please report.

Abe: Really? Nice.

Unsharing the stream Innearth finished familiarizing himself with the controls. They were simpler than he had imagined but had more hidden options that he knew what to do with – he could attach a camera to a monster and have it follow their movement or as if imagining they had eyes and looking through those. He could link several cameras together and split the "stream's view" into sections that each showed a smaller area and customize how that was displayed. He could even "record" a few seconds and replay it or slow down a section and then speed it up.

He couldn't yet "[save recording]" and anything recorded would be lost when the stream ended but this still provided a lot of customizability. More so than any of his friends had used at least.

While playing around Innearth had fully explored 5 of the hallways.

Again, the first 2 were empty and ended almost disappointingly. The 3rd however, headed upwards into a mess of holes that would trigger someone with even light trypophobia. Small grey ants – stone ants – built an entire sprawling colony 200m below the ground. The water slime found this area and happily began an assault upon the colony – more and more ants being swallowed and swirled around its belly while it moved. A cataclysm upon the insects.

Less than a minute into its assault, a faint light passed over the slime in a wave twisting through its body as it continued to trash dozens of the small monsters. It was at this moment that Innearth realized something.

The water slime had just ranked up. But not to level 1. To some unknown higher rank… level 2? Level 4? 8? What rank is the slime? And when did it advance?

Thinking back, there was plenty of times he hadn't been paying attention to it – weeks passed without him seeing the slime but still. When Silver advanced. When his Scout had advanced. He had felt it.

…he should have been able to feel this monster's advancement as well…right?

Trying to figure out what had changed was hard – instead of a clear jelly tinted blue and swirling with water mana the current slime was filled to the brim with all sorts of grey, black, and yellow colours…but those were all definitely just the remains of the ants…

Which all should have been able to kill the slime.

Which all would have killed the slime had it been a normal slime but this one had been altered somehow by its levels and moved differently now that Innearth was paying attention.

The inside of the slime was a constant swirl of motion its smooth and calm exterior betraying the ferocity its body held within.

Some of the larger army ants shot out tiny needles of stone. Each of which just floated about the body harmlessly before getting passed through and deposited on the ground behind it.

The water slime was actually a terror. If the current genocide being committed against the stone ants was replicated on a large scale it would have been terrifying.

As is, it was kind of cute.

Feeling like this was as good a point as any Innearth reshared his stream to Abe leaving a camera dangling over the insect massacre. Attaching the camera to the slime he confirmed it followed the trail of death and destruction up the hall and sat back.

The slime churned through armies and picked groups up in bundles before smashing them against the wall in a wet slapping manner.

Bits of the slime vibrated and ripped apart ants while others were simply pressed down into the ground and flattened as it passed.

When the stream of ants attacking the slime slowed, the battle didn't end.

Pushing against the holes and squishing a small portion of themselves down the tubes, the slime sent tendrils as far in as they could reach. Every few seconds a tendril would suck back up carrying multiple squirming ants before sucking them in and plunging back in again.

Oozing its body in and out of the colony, tendrils of liquid flowing through thin tubes and spread throughout the whole nest. Less and less prey was returned and soon all the colony was decimated.

If Innearth knew more about wild animals he might have made a connection between the slime's last few attack patterns and an anteaters' tongue. The comparison broke down slightly with the water slimes "tongue" splitting into a tree that went down every tunnel, but it was good enough.

Twice more the slime had flashed slightly as it ranked up. The first time having drastically increased its mass while the second gave the slime millions of small crack-like lines. These lines made the slime look like it was made of glass and shattered – the cracks persisting in weird ways as the body pulled itself upwards and shook forming and deforming but mostly staying stable despite the constantly flowing liquid.

Turning away from a clean hallway the slime happily slinked back towards Innearth's core and fell asleep at his side. Nudging itself up against his core like a puppy before setting down into a puddle.

…okay lil guy. Well done.

Abe: Bruh. That's...adorable.

Innearth: ...somehow I forgot you were watching. You weren't making any comments.

Abe: I'm not making fun of you :3 if you want to keep a slime pet that's totally fine. I noticed it's an ascended monster. How did you manage to keep a slime alive long enough for it to evolve?

Innearth: ...My great skill.

Abe: So you have no clue huh.

Innearth: ...that would be an accurate assessment.

Innearth: Okay, don't tell anyone else but based on how muted those rank ups feel - and considering I can't quite place its initial ascension - I'm starting to wonder if any other dungeon monsters have evolved while I wasn't looking.

Abe: lmao.

Innearth: Hey, it's not my fault. I evolved two of my crystal snakes and felt it. I felt exactly when they advanced but now that I'm thinking about it...like now that I'm trying to explain myself that might have just been because I was watching them at the time?

Abe: No I felt when NotAnExpendableBomb1 & 2 evolved. I wasn't watching them at the time so it can't be that

Innearth: What's up with your naming convention?

Abe: Ascended monsters aren't allowed to suicide bomb.

Innearth: oh I got what it means...just seems like a dumb naming system.

While heading off on a tangent with Abe Innearth started inventorying his regular monsters in case any had evolved. He stopped sharing the stream telling Abe he had had enough before starting on a conversation about the importance of names.

Checking his second oldest monster – the pool snake – then working his way slowly through the rest of them he couldn't find any that had reached level 1. Just the water slime who probably needed a better name now and his scout who spent longer and longer periods hunting between his naps in the crystal caverns.

I should make a conscious effort to advance more monsters. I haven't had one advance in months…or at least while I was watching.

Returning to the expansion effort, the 4th tunnel directly opposite the cleared out ant tunnel sloped down into a flat pool of magma. The top was covered in rock with only a few cracks that indicated what was trapped beneath.

At some point the magma had probably pushed up through the whole tunnel – in fact, it might even have created the tunnel for faint traces of fire mana ran through the stone all the way up to the ants.

The 5th tunnel sloped down to an identical pool of liquid while the 6th sloped up and grew smaller…before suddenly heading downwards and changing.

As it headed sideways the tunnel wall stretched out like a sideways crack. It split and rejoined itself into multiple wide tunnels that frequently showed small windows into each other.

These flat torpedo-like tunnels were the precursor to ambient mana levels spiking and small creatures appearing.

Paying more attention to this area, Innearth followed his small army of greater snakes as they moved into a true natural biome.

Small carapace'd beetles with stone shells that blended into the walls crawled about.

Stalks of a wheat-like purple plant waved about drawing in darkness constantly and somehow making the room brighter by doing so.

A skittering many-legged cousin of a spider mated with a crab, sliced open a shelled beetle and sucked its insides up through its legs.

Small bats – real bats not the rough unmoving outline his crystal bats were – flew about swooping down to prey on the spider-crab and the stone-shelled beetles alike.

As Innearth continued to expand into this area – claiming it for his own – a short standoff happened when his dungeon monsters were introduced to the local fauna.

Bats swooped down to attack and were shot out of the sky with ease – Innearth's greater crystal snakes were excessively overkill for the area.

Seeming to recognize the threat after enough wildlife fell to Innearth's snakes, the remaining animals and monsters ignored and hid from the snakes hoping they would pass them by.

Continuing on without wanting any surprises Innearth flowed over rocky caves and found jaws.

Giant jaws that made Innearth freeze for half a second before continuing on once he realized they were frozen in the air.

Slowly the room and its contents were excavated.

A monstrous, partly buried and fully fossilized skeleton filled the room. Giant jaws 3 meters tall and 6 meters long filled the mouth of a creature easily 20 meters long.

The remains were in remarkably good condition and a single white, mouse-sized creature moved about them constantly. Slowly uncovering more of the bones from the ground and strengthening them while running thin needle-like white fingers across them that pushed out a whitish-grey colour.

It looks almost the same as the fossils? Some sort of bone mana? Some sort of bone flesh?

Watching as it cleaned and scared the wildlife away from its home Innearth spent time studying the monster's remains – for anything that made bones like that had to be a monster!

Most of what the beast looked like was lost to time, but from what little he could see Innearth was impressed.

I want to make something like this. There's something to be said for size. I don't think I have any huge monsters right now.

Continuing on the area past this fossil lowered the ambient mana slowly before the myriad of caves tapered off into nothing.

I really need to show my dungeon off but before that, I want to make a boss – the crystal caverns don't have one currently and that seems lazy.

I also want to finish up a few things I started so everything's ready for the tour.

Turning the main section of his attention to an area below his old core room, he checked the mana oven, sighing disappointedly when he saw the contents hadn't changed enough to warrant their use.

Looking around he tried to find any unique materials that might improve his boss creation but nothing really stood out.

There was rainbow soaked stone from way back when he had killed a demon in his halls…but from Doc he knew those were likely to make a madness-soaked monster. Not a demon but potentially something as bad as the Silver flesh. As useful as the rising natural mana in the area with them was, the material itself was essentially toxic waste.

There were also chunks of the cracked core hidden in a hole…

Honestly, they make me feel weird whenever I see them…but then again if I use them I won't have to see them anymore.

Anything else? There were countless small slightly mana-soaked materials in his dungeon by now but most didn't seem that useful. In one of the pillar rooms frequented by the invisible monster many of the crystals had transformed slightly, most would reflect objects weird or warp light around them to appear shifted…but none were as strong as the monster that made that room home and adding them felt closer to the "adding for the sake of adding not for any real reason" fallacy Innearth didn't want to fall into.

…there's also the unstable liquid crystal but that actively makes stuff worse unless I go all in and make a weak shifting monster…

I think I want to use some of the cracked core. And maybe…well I want to make a monster similar to the bones down below. What if I take those bones and make something out of them?

Asking a few greater snakes to bring him the skull of the prehistoric beast, Innearth watched as the small bone uncovering creature shrieked at them and jumped about.

…sorry lil guy. I'll make sure to use this well.

Bringing the skull up to a suitably large room Innearth worked on expanding a cave in the crystal cavern.

100m in diameter seemed good for this boss was huge I want it to have enough space. This room is currently a squarish 38x20 shape but there's another room beside it I can cannibalize and I don't have to finish making the room before I make the boss.

Sculpting a wide cavern roughly 60m in diameter Innearth grew impatient and began creating the monster instead.

I'm going to make this monster manually because I'm positive it gives more experience...it takes much more time and energy but at least this way I can ignore my maximum mana and just keep adding stuff to it. Let's see, How should I start?

The skull had two fearsome jaws and Innearth focused on them. The fossilized bone was weaker than he had hoped but contained an ancient-feeling mana Innearth had no clue how to replicate. Including the skull felt important.

Slowly wrapping the skull in "Metal mana+Iron" Innearth plated the skull and added a circular hinge at that back. He wanted to go all out on this monster and that meant pulling out his "rare" materials.

Rhenium was something he had bought on the market a while back for an exorbitant price. It was the most effective physical element he could find to use with Void mana, but barely worth the cost in cores.

The two grams he had bought had been 100 t1 cores. Innearth didn't want to admit to his friends he had spent that much just on material but had been saving it for something special.

That much Rhenium was not enough to make much of anything…and was even more wasteful when you realized Void mana ate away at a lot of it before it stuck.

The strength of the material made was undeniable, however.

This was too precious to use on a tooth or the back of the mouth so Innearth worked on making as strong of a core as he could out of it.

Making a void core efficiently was painfully slow. Void mana destroyed nearly everything it touched unless controlled with an iron fist of strength and even then it quickly ate through nearly half of the Rhenium. Keeping it steady the Void mana stuck and bonded quickly becoming an object that would destroy anything but more Rhenium like butter.

…But Innearth wasn't using this on a weapon. He was wasting it on a core.

What am I doing…

Innearth moved his ball up and down sinking it into the floor quickly watching it melt through the stone leaving nothing behind before he redoubled his original thought process.

Yeah, I feel like this is better used as the most important piece in a circuit.

Covering the Void material with the thinnest layer of the rest of his Rhenium that he could manage, he placed it deep in the skull before turning to the rest of his void tangent. Silver was also good to use with Void mana and much much cheaper – nearly infinite with time and the silver flesh.

…that's a weird tangent. Void mana is based upon rarity right? It works better with rarer materials? If I mass produce silver will it slowly get worse with silver? Hmm…no. I don't think I could affect it myself. But then again gold and silver work well with mental mana because of perceived worth right? So maybe it is that simple to change how it works…

Filling the whole mouth with an insulating layer of "Metal mana + Silver" and then a corrosive destroying layer of "Void mana + Silver" Innearth made a mouth that would dissolve anything it could hold on to long enough. Thick curved teeth were made around its whole jaw out of the same silvery void and the jaws were brought together and opened several times before Innearth was satisfied.

Turning to the backside of the monster, Innearth laid a long tube of Bromine and Life mana focused as far as he could to regeneration. Bromine was a liquid and had the same effect as mercury for "non-consumable" healing…but was much cheaper at a higher rank.

Laying a second pathway beside the tube with 10 "sacks" of healing potion Innearth hoped this monster could survive a beating. Taking a cue from his snakes, he made ringed bones but on a massive scale. Gravity bones were placed as a second layer deeper in and crystal muscles were layered over everything.

Tiny specks of crystals were placed in each muscle – an alternating pattern of Kinetic and Gravity crystals that would aid in movement and prevent the whole monster from collapsing.

This monster is really chonky now. The bigger Innearth grew his monster the more effort needed to be put in to keep it stable and useful – there was no point in making a monster bigger than a bus if it couldn't stand up or move afterwards.

But he had learned all sorts of tips and tricks over the past almost 2 years and was well able to make a "giant" monster by now.

…A good part of the effort he was putting in right now was with a similar sort of view as him making the dwarf that was still hard at work theming his first few floors.

He wanted to make a big monster to prove he could. He wanted to make a boss larger than any of the monsters he had seen in any of his friend's dungeons.

…teach 'em for calling all my first monsters small. Innearth muttered to himself while he worked.

Each muscle was symmetrical and slid together perfectly into a repeating pattern and, as Innearth did so, a facet of his crystal mana slid into the whole working. Muscle cells became a crystal lattice and began to repeat without his imput.

As Innearth toiled away a faint idea of something to do started to form.

He hadn't managed to make a moveable shrunk room yet but maybe if he used it here it might work.

…I want the outside to be large but it doesn't need to be that big on the inside…but then again trying to shrink the inside of the monster untested seems dumb…it does seem like I should practice on other monsters before using that technique on something I'm putting so many resources in.

…but then again I really feel like it's the thing to do.

Waffling back and forth and considering the price of what he had spent already vs how much his instincts were telling him to try it, he finally relented.

I don't like basing stuff off of core feelings. I want to make stuff logically. But then again my instincts haven't really led me astray before have they?

Pulling everything out of the center except for some muscles Innearth focused on using his void affinity to shrink.

From the circular ribs inwards space was twisted and pulled together. Bits of crystal muscles exploded all throughout it but some survived and were condensed as they compressed.

Holding it in this shrunk space until it took Innearth watched as liquid crystal spread through the air falling and shattering and then flowing away.

Okay, let's see if it can be moved.

Pulling a rip slightly and then trying to pull all the ribs made his working start to fluctuate as if breaking so he let go and waited for it to calm down.

Is this a failure? I feel like it's a failure...Should I remake this section of the monster or keep going?

I guess I'll see it through to the end. I've never tried making a shrunk zone inside a monster before...I just wish my instincts weren't screaming I had to use it on this boss.

Pulling the premium void core and placing it in the middle of the shrunk area made it appear to grow and take up a large space inside of it. Laying first in one direction and then the other spirals of cores were made in a double helix of crystal, gravity, void.

The ice cavern addition to the crystal caverns didn't look like it would happen in time for the tour but Innearth made a few ice cores and added them to the mix along with a few life cores. The end result had 35 each crystal/kinetic/gravity/void cores +1 special void + 5 ice + 5 life + 1 slightly bigger but still tier 1 "Pure core". The idea was that quantity was a quality all on its own and if enough small cores came together they might reach the same heights as a tier 4 core.

He had certainly spent enough mana by now that the "cost" was higher than a tier 4 core.

Taking several glances at the pile of bones below, he tried to fill in the gaps with imagination. It seemed to have way too many spikes in weird places and Innearth could only see 5 legs so he assumed it had 6.

This is deeper so it matters less but setting up stuff that is supposed to heal takes up a lot of energy. In that regard, living crystal is much more efficient. The crystal dwarf needs to wear those gloves - I want this beast to thrive not just survive.

The whole back was covered in a bed of living crystals that sunk into the muscles and latched onto the ribs as they grew into the dead crystal and fused.

Flipping back and forth between the areas Innearth finished his main body.

He then took another cue from his crystal snakes and lay repeating crystal scales over the full length. He couldn't tell from the bones but they looked like a creature that used to have scales. No part of him doubted it used to be covered with them.

Looking with a critical eye over the creature Innearth decided to decorate it a small bit more before finishing.

Two swirled emerald-coloured gems were set in the eye sockets and remembering the disco ball like material, he created a small pocket behind the eyes that held a sliver of it. When shining through those eyes they glowed and refracted beams of light throughout the room in a slightly green layer of dots that Innearth thought looked suitably "cool".

Good as a distraction or way to show off at the start of the boss battle? Either way, I think it's done!

Let there be life!

Anxiety filled Innearths core as he watched the crystal monster stir.

Standing up slowly and laboriously it rippled with mana and tensed and flexed parts of its body causing Innearth to tense. Relaxing once he realized the shrinking construct held perfectly appearing natural and completely bound to the monster Innearth watched the boss stalk about the room. Moving quickly and catlike as it circled the chamber Innearth had made for it and reminded him he wanted to make a larger area for the boss soon.

I think my friends will love this.