Chương 61: The Storm before the Calm.

Of all the natural monsters in the world one of the most valuable is known as the gold worms from the Shirka canyon. The canyon itself has an extremely high number of gold patches and frequent thunderstorms. Lighting strikes the canyon walls and floors and liquifies the gold into molten tidepools at least once a week. The gold worms then swarm from everywhere nearby and gorge themselves on the molten metal before it cools.

After eating their fill, these intrepid little monsters spin little golden nests and lay hundreds of little golden babies. These sacs of eggs remain almost dormant until the next thunderstorm. The sacs themselves wait until hours before the next storm before suddenly sensing something in the air they all hatch and spread to the far ends of the canyon to continue their weird life cycle. Now. The reason these gold worms are valuable is the golden caviar or "godly golden ingredient" their egg sacs represent.

Wealthy businessman and nobles from all over the world ship in their eggs to enjoy as both a delicacy and a sense of pride. Sadly, these golden prizes cannot be farmed well, nor can they exist outside of the Shirka caverns resulting in their low volume and high value. Excerpt obtained from 'The Beastiary of rare and unusual monsters". Time passed as it tends to do. Innearth had started leaving his focus split so long and was so bored he was starting to pretend each section had a separate personality.

His "Adventurer-seeking mind" made a second laser mana searchlight. After having the scout break trees in a line away from his dungeon to try and create a "line of a clearing", he gave them the job of tunnelling back and forth in the air carrying the new searchlight. Ohohoho. This shall surely work I say! Do you not agree Mr Scout Old Chap? … Slightly earlier in the timeline, his pure "expansion-focused mind" picked up the exact moment he advanced to tier 6 and immediately used his [Descent] Gift to tunnel down.

Innearth relocated just over a 100 meters down into a new chamber near – but not below – the bottom of his existing ice caverns. Not needing as many doors anymore he broke apart 5 of his blast doors – scraps for other parts of his mind to make more mana ovens – and used choice parts to make a new null stone protective blast door. After tidying up everything, this mind returned to pushing downwards with the burrowers deeper and deeper into the Earth. … diggy diggy diggy. Oh how I love digging. I lied. Buh bunnn.

Why can't I assign a monster to push my influence outwards this – suuuuccks – why am I in charge of expansion… we should swap periodically. Ice cavern designer can spend some time mindlessly expanding. See how he likes it smh. … The largest and most involved changes were done by the portion of his attention in charge of "Ice Cavern Design".

With a dedicated section of his consciousness "The Ice Caverns" were finally given the attention they deserved – decorations were added and now when you walked through them, occasionally you could find frozen crystal dwarves or pickaxes that stared out of the walls at you. One or two of the dwarves were a variation purposefully built for the cold that could break out of their entombed state to attack unwary adventurers with magic ice picks. The largest theme of the floor however was survival against the elements.

There were less traps to disarm for the floor's main effect was a blistering cold. To aid this effect, the most involved change that happened to this floor was the creation of the "snow machine". First Innearth made a large room and filled it with Sand and a bit of Air mana. He commissioned Wind, Storm and mist mana materials from FED and set the room to an endlessly spinning tornado of mana and movement. Then he set a sprinkler system with plants that "bled" water down tubes into giant spinning kinetic turbines.

The water hit the spinning blades and shot everywhere in a light spray above the chamber. He added an excessive amount of Ice mana and a central snowman with a hint of unique snow mana material to help blend everything manually. Finally, he pumped a large amount of pure mana into the area and set up a "pure mana oven" on the side to try and aspect it with snow and cold. This whole chamber would churn out snow mana unique materials pretty consistently.

It didn't have many crazy magical effects, but it took to being the flesh of snowmen incredibly well. There was also a nice bonus of snow mana materials selling well on the market and Innearth set up a little side hustle of undercutting the whole market with an endless low volume of the stuff. Of course a more focused change to these floors was the final design of the "zone boss" and "wandering floor boss".

As this zone was more open than any he had made so far, the steam-powered horse schematic made a comeback after going through the gauntlet of the dungeon games race. Shrinking the design down and distributing the load between 6 "smaller horses" Innearth created a sled that was pulled by these "reindeer". In the sled itself, a larger snowman mage was set up that could pelt adventurers with icicles from afar.

The santa mini-boss would skid around the 13 th and 14 th floors at a great speed and would need to be chased down to be properly fought. The final boss was a tier 9 snowman base with connections to a dozen smaller snowman. The start of the boss fight involved what looked like 12 normal snowmen rolling together. After combining into a massive ice and snow golem shaped like a linebacker covered in exercise balls the boss would begin charging.

This boss fight was situated directly to the side of the snow chamber and Innearth figured out how to reroute quite a bit of the snow runoff into the boss room on an event trigger. The result was a boss fight in the middle of a blizzard against a massive gorilla of a boss that was more agile than it had any right to be for its size. At this point the zone was nearly complete, Innearth just wanted to expand it a bit more and set up some sort of puzzle in it.

A puzzle because he had added at least one to all of his previous main zones and wanted to follow the theme. Should I set up a story in this floor? What about all three? Some sort of linked questline? Hmmm. I could make a bunch of snow homes for the snowmen. Or continue my battling theme and create a sort of war between snowmen… where they are constantly throwing snowballs at each other? Could give them differently coloured scarves and pretend the different colours hate each other? …

no that doesn't match the vibe I want the ice caverns to have. Unlike having different base elements like the snakes and spiders any war between snowmen would be completely manufactured and feel fake... Hmmm. Somethings missing. I need one final addition before the zone really pops. Could always ask FED for advice… but no. I want to do this on my own. Any puzzles I can do with the cold? Maybe they have to melt stuff? I'll keep thinking. …

Moving on down the line "Odds and ends" mind mass-produced crystal loot by creating simple weapons and leaving them in mana ovens. They would set all the good to great ones as random loot for bosses, unique monsters and the occasional hidden room or treasure chest. Besides setting drops this was creating huge "pools" of potential weapons both designed and randomized for later.

Then – after collecting the rest in a giant trash pile along with some of the larger monster corpses they were in charge of cleaning up – he would set them to being broken down and "fixed" by several crystal dwarves that were getting better at crafting on their own. A squad of humanoid crystal golems with appendages that could grab trash quickly was created and directed about – to fund this "less garbage on the ground!" initiative. Innearth also moved this processing and crafting facility down to his lowest floor.

Innearth now had 15 floors and the ambient mana levels were nearly 5x as high as they were at the surface this "high". This whole "initiative" was made after Innearth found out more information about the world around him almost on accident while researching sapients and trying to figure out ways to attract them. It turned out quite a bit of the "essentially garbage" monster parts that Innearth had been ignoring were useful for other races to craft with.

From what he could tell from the market and his friends, adventurers collected monster corpses quite frequently – almost considering them the same as actual loot. There was some sort of magical laundering process that having been a part of a monster gave materials. A theoretical example would be taking a rough red fire gem that most crafters would consider was too much work to process.

After creating a unique monster by placing it in the center of a magma spider (or similar) this "rough red fire gem" would be considered something like a "crystalized heart of a molten arachnid". Despite having theoretically once been a rock, the process of turning materials into a monster meant this new "monster flesh" could be turned into a spice or rare meat for cooking. Or a binding agent for some armour. Or the core of heating system in some city. Or the sacrifice for some strange enhancement process.

Repeat endlessly for different uses depending on the material. Magic is weird. Innearth knew that by combing pure elements with mana and turning them into a monster, other elements would be mixed into the flesh and turned into different microscopic compounds. He had even found a few materials he didn't have access to by re adding monster flesh to his inventory and getting back more rare base parts. …

he had known that, but he didn't realize by picking up a random rock and including it in his monster creation spell it would be "fleshified" as well. Beside the attempts to turn monster parts into loot Innearth had also found at least some adventurers didn't look fondly upon "messy" dungeons with piles of monster corpses.

Even if it was only a few that liked clean dungeons Innearth didn't want to finally get another adventurer only for them to be turned off by the mess and not recommend him to their friends and acquaintances.

I should see about making more tier 2 crystal dwarves with slightly different appendages or circuits and maybe try shaping them differently to see if I can get other item making spells other than rune making because the dwarves seem to have a lot of general crafting skills but there are some pretty strong sounding effect that FED has gotten with his cult making him potions and I'd love to see more examples of spells I can't use. Innearth constantly muttered various thoughts to himself without pause.

This personality was… it embraced his absentmindedness and frequently switched what it was doing or thinking about. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. …

"Social butterfly" Innearth was constantly in his group chat and had taken to talking to Brutality Queen more and more. It had started out with the occasional bet or either of them showing off something they had done to try and impress the other but after a few months, Innearth realized he was probably talking to her more than any of his other friends. … That had been a strange discovery and Innearth had asked if people would be fine with adding her to the group chat.

Amy was for the change and Abe was confused by it but ultimately agreed with most requests made. Doc hadn't seemed to care while FED had seemed initially uncomfortable with a new addition but quickly agreed and added her as the "owner" of the server. Social Butterfly Innearth also spent some time sending excited streams of Oynx doing regular things to his friend's amusement and then suffering.

Even Doc who had initially been fascinated by the idea of a dungeon monster becoming a sapient stopped joining the streams when he showed Onyx eating food for the 10th time. Of his conversations with Brutality Queen the most illuminating was probably her insight into unique monsters Brutality Queen: Yes! You asked me for help! Okay, So it's hard to point out a single action that leads to Ascension but there are plenty of things you can do to increase your chances. Brutality Queen: First off.

Probably the most important point but lower "tiered" souls have a much easier chance of ascension. Most of my dirt golems don't even have a core because while they are much weaker like that they can "split away from you" much easier if there is less of you in them to begin with. Every tier of core you give them makes them require more and more experience for them to advance. Plus side is tier 0 monsters are "dirt" cheap to make. Heh. Get it? Brutality Queen: Okay Some other advice.

There seems to be a lot of conflicting information about it on the market and plenty of cores are even saying the opposite of me… but I feel like my results speak for themselves. Monsters have a much easier time of breaking away from you if they are more "unique". Thirty-five alive ascended monsters as of yesterday! Because of that I've taken to putting sprinkles of natural dirt in my dirt monsters so nearly all of them are more "unique" …

it makes much worse flesh than pure dirt mana materials but the "flaws" create more unique – and thus more likely to advance – situations. Brutality Queen: It doesn't actually have to be a unique monster however. Individuality plays a big part of it. I've taken to giving all of my monsters – both mud and dirt variants – different faces and shapes because it seems to help. Some even have flowers planted in their heads or bits of plants integrated into their bodies before I seed them. Brutality Queen: Finally.

Something that is the most obvious is that they need experience. You've probably found they get nearly no experience when fighting each other right? Its not zero but it might as well be. I've solved this by drawing hundreds of natural monsters into my dungeon and letting them roam about my main jungle floors. Every time a dungeon monster fights one of the natural monsters and wins or at least survives its that much closer to advancing. Brutality Queen: to recap. Individuality and experience.

Make em low tier: 3 - good luck. Innearth: Well. Thanks for that. Want to see my slime king fight the prehistoric raiders? It sounds like this situation is already ripe for advancement. I'm following nearly all your points! … Brutality Queen: … I love it. Has Amy seen this? And yeah, give it a few more weeks and I'm sure you'll start getting ascensions. They will be ascending left and right based on all these natural monsters on both sides of your little war. …

Of all his minds however, what could be considered his final but "Main" mind spent the last bit of time talking to Onyx and helping him prepare to leave his dungeon. Did you pack everything?

"Yes. I'm prepared." Want to stay a bit longer?

"It's already been weeks and weeks since I wanted to leave. I'm sorry but I think I'm going to leave now before I never do. I… Goodbye. I'm going to make my own way in the world now. Wish me luck!" With those parting words, the dwarf strode purposefully out of the lighthouse entrance to Innearth's dungeon. A few steps out of Innearth's influence and Innearth could no longer see them – despite their relative physical proximity to him. Sighing, Innearth felt a sense of loss.

There had never been a problem with the Snake Scout leaving – but a good part of that was the implied "Will be back later" that accompanied every single excursion. He hadn't even been nervous that the scout would die outside of his dungeon and never return – even if a few of the surrounding natural monsters had been stronger than him, the scout was good at staying out of trouble and knew not to bite off more than he could chew. But Onyx leaving was permanent.

Innearth had a faint desire to lock them away and prevent them from ever leaving but he pushed down and suppressed that as hard as he could. Just as he was beginning to finish feeling loss Onyx returned. Without responding to Innearth's joyous "You're back!", the crystal dwarf moved purposefully down to his workshop – dodging the traps he had been involved with setting up and making his way through the occasional secret passageway or elevator.

Reaching his old workbench, the dwarf bent over and began roughly rummaging about, surprising the new crystal dwarf that had taken his place. What are you doing? Slowly a device took shape. Mental materials and runes were connected in spiralling patterns and inlaid into a bowl and amulet. Turning to the old slime booth Onyx moved over purposefully reaching in and scooping up the wobbling slime off of its mental plate then carefully dropping it in the bowl.

Reaching out Innearth touched the connection and heard his son speak.

"I'll keep in touch. You'll want to know if I manage to convince anyone to visit you right? Also… I can tell you what I've been doing. Anyways I'm off again. This time for good. Make sure to put my replacement to work well. Maybe one day he'll ascend as well!" Turning around the dwarf carefully retraced his steps and exited once more. This time his loss affected Innearth less. He had maintained a connection. And even if he won't be able to see him the connection made it feel like he hadn't truly left.

To make the second departure even nicer a final gift had been left behind when the dwarf stepped out of his dungeon for the last time. Checking his status he saw the change to his advancement requirements – 1/2500 delves. Despite being dungeon-born, the crystal dwarf had counted for a single delve when it had returned to give him a connection. … Good luck. … Time passed as it tends to do. The longer Innearth went, the worse his mental stability got.

The number of fake personalities in his mind grew as if the taste of adventurers he had gotten during the mysterious island event had broken something deep inside of him. While before he had longed and worked towards getting adventurers now Innearth craved them. Despite having made up his personalities – and there being no indication that splitting one's mind to focus on separate tasks should actually "make new personalities" – Innearth's mind kept creating more and more personas.

It got to the point where he would argue with himself or find two personalities were fighting and using a third to send messages back and forth. Eventually each "split" got a personality and Innearth's experimentations grew less focused and more strange. 15 days were spent trying to figure out if he could make an "adventurer finding and attracting" mana. Everything has a mana type right? And how useful they are is how easy it is to find and make them? Well this mana type would be incredibly useful.

Let's get me some "adventurer finding and attracting" materials! I'll settle for figuring out a spell that will do that. I just have to want it hard enough right? That's how this works isn't it? Innearth made a series of strange shaped monsters that looked weird just for the sake of being weird.

Reminded of how demons had been shaped in ways that no natural creature could be made normally Innearth played with making umbrella shaped creatures or monsters that looked like hundreds of normal monsters shoved together into a giant human centipede like shape. Of these strange creatures the pinnacle of his experiments was a boss made in a way much simpler than his previous. Its structure and shape was less "crazy" than his previous experiments but was still worth being called the boss of them by its actions.

The monster was a giant hydra with 8 snake heads and necks, attached to a single "turtle schematic base". Each head was lovingly sculpted for individuality and given separate circuits purposefully to give them separate personalities. Each head was given a tier 9 core and a separate spiraling circuit that looked like a strand of DNA moving down the whole length of their neck. This boss was given a huge store of healing and regeneration sacks in both its necks and body along with giant clawed feet and a long tail…

however the largest and most important addition to the hydra was in its companions. Each head was paired to a separate mental and connection bond similar to the "spider and bat" combination. One had a human centipede, another a feline creature that looked like a spring with legs. Four of the heads had companions that looked like the equivalent of the letters H, D, O, and X in a puffed-out three-dimensional shape. The final two were made of what looked like a humanoid creature cut in half into two separate monsters.

The left body was silver and held one of the strongest crystal swords Innearth had made, while the right body was gold and carried a scale that enhanced their spell casting. Finally these two monsters could combine into "one" creature but spent most of their time hopping about on one leg. The boss acted similarly to Innearth in that each of its heads were constantly doing something and bickering with one another in the massive cavern Innearth had made them.

To complete this "messed up" floor that was the brain child of Innearth's increasingly erratic mind, all his experiments were dumped about and abandoned in rolling hills of bluish crystalline grass. Countless creations in strange shapes with no purpose other than that "he could" littered the floor and crawled about. Their twisted features and movement gave the scene a whole undertone of madness. None of the monsters actualy had "madness" materials inside of them but…

perhaps due to Innearth's mental state while designing them without a role – or perhaps due to their shapes that were hard to fight with – the floor was full of monsters that gave nonsensical riddles, crawled endlessly in circles, or played strange games with one another. An example of this "strangeness" was found in a pair of bent monsters shaped like upside down L's and J's who tossed a wiggling ball shaped monster back and forth for an audience of "stick armed cubes".

Another was located by the far corner where a group of W and lightning bolt snakes swung lazily off of a transplanted tree and talked about the state of the world. And so on and so forth. These experimentations into shapes actually made Innearth better at designing regular monsters but he turned around and used those new strengths to make even weirder monsters endlessly as his "purposeless" floor of experimental rejects grew larger and larger. …

Finally, after months of steady decline, a stray comment by Doc seemed to spark something inside of him and pull him out of the funk he was in. It had started simply enough. Doc had finally managed to create his portal hub and had figured out a combination of tricks to make them more useful. A team of monsters he had created had fixed several problems he had had with them and they were finally at a point where he was happy with them.

At this point all an adventurer had to do was press a "keystone" against his arched entranceways before a corresponding portal would appear momentarily and then disappear once they passed through or waited too long. Each archway could hold a large number of destinations and – due to their brief period of being open – very few demons fell through.

It was when Doc was talking about how safe they were and how frequently his adventurers blipped about his dungeon without having to see unwanted demons that something clicked. Innearth: Would be fun if you could blip some to me huh. Why can't you by the way? Something something demons? I'm not afraid of demons! Amy: … Innearth you're increasingly making me worried lately. Are you okay? ZeMadDoctor: Hmmm… To be honest Innearth. Nothing is stopping me now. Over the distance to you…

Well it will be a lot more dangerous again but if you are willing to deal with those dangers I can help you out. I've made the short range portals basically demon free. But to you. It's back to letting smaller demons through. Innearth: Amy don't worry I'm fine! And okay. Yeah what do I have to do for you to mail me some of those sweet sweet adventures? ZeMadDoctor: Prove you can deal with any demons that could leak through the portal. Summon a few lesser demons using monsters with no cores.

Summon a few stronger ones with tier 1 cores. I think the maximum strength demon that might get through. Is equivalent to what you could make with a tier 2 core. But I'll help you out with that. As long as you can prove you can handle the first two. I'm only mentioning this as an option because I believe you can do it… if you think you're up for it set up a stream for me and show off your defenses. Good luck. Innearth: … okay. Give me a bit. Finally, after time floundering Innearth had a lifeline.

Before he had a goal to work towards, but now he had a specific set of actions he could take to reach that goal. I really think this is going to work.