Chapter 86: Greater Continuations

Chapter 86: Greater Continuations

Perhaps unsurprisingly, spending five minutes just staring at my core did not help me choose an evolution.

All three of the options were very lovely, really. Shadow, intelligence, strength—a perfect marriage of all the cave bear's abilities, but I had to choose only one. Very unfortunate.

Lesser bugbear called to me—not the word lesser, admittedly, but the phrasing of it. I could still remember the available schemas from my own evolutions, the ones that started out with sapience instead of having to evolve it like the horned serpent or obtain it through exposure to my own brilliance like Seros. Lesser bugbear seemed to follow a similar vein, rising through the ranks of their own brutish strength and learning intelligence alongside it, although I imagined it was still a lesser form of sapience like the kobolds than the type that could sit down and have a proper conversation with me. Ah well.

Midnight cave bear as well—that lined up with what he had been studying, sticking to his shadow-attuned mana and the darkness he had so learned to coat himself in. Combined with Nuvja's blessing, I could see how this choice would blossom him to new heights, protecting both him and all those he wanted, hidden from both the moon and day as he hunted. A wonderful image, really.

And then two-headed bear.

I could practically taste the potential through the words, the lingering power that lurked on the edge of my core like jagged claws. With his shadow-magic and her brute strength, they would be a monster upon my halls; stalking through the darkness of the fourth floor or a towering force on the fifth, there would be little that could ever stand in their path.

Objectively, it was the strongest choice. Ignoring everything else, two heads were better than one, and already my mind swam with the potential of staggered sleep schedules, dual attacks, training, split awarenesses—a brief mention of slavering wreck, sure, but power beyond power as well.

But. Well.

If I were a purely power-focused beast, I would have killed Seros on the first day, brought down the cavern to crush his head and claim his schema. I would have evolved all my creatures into only the fiercest and most vicious options, crafted my halls as only endless hallways of monstrous beasts and hidden traps, burrowed straight down and murdered all those in my path.

But that wasn't me.

I didn't want that to be me.

Because as much as I shoved it off, as much as I would never mention it, I looked forward to my chats with Seros, discussing the going-ons of the dungeon and what he should try hunting next. I enjoyed watching the mage ratkin train her underlings to harness their own magic, watching the horned serpent command her army with tyrannical precision, Nicau grow into his Name and the power with it. The floors I built thrived under my care and detail—because they were ecosystems, not just floors, not just corridors to kill invaders.

I was building something in the way that I wanted to, and I cared for my creatures.

A life spent in grief is no life at all.

Not an untrue phrase, but equally pressing was the concern that the two-headed bear only functioned if the two heads actually got along. And for all they had been mates, they had been rivals first, and both bore the scars of their fierce and bitter fights.

Would they be able to work together if I evolved him? Perhaps. And perhaps bringing her soul back would be enough for him to get over his grief, to learn to live with her and work together in this new form, but.

But.

But maybe it made him miserable, maybe it trapped him alongside an endless reminder of what could never be, maybe they ripped each other to shreds in a desperate attempt for freedom that their shared body could never provide.

I poked through his mind, glimpsing his most recent thoughts—grief, raw and jagged, echoed back at me, but also the understanding that she was dead. He was a dungeonborn creature and death was no stranger; she had been the closest to him, but already he had watched generation after generation of burrowing rats meet their end in the Fungal Gardens. He understood death.

And past his grief for his mate, there was also the new, rising thought of his cubs.

They were almost grown, nearly self-sufficient, but still young; the world was dark and cruel and cold, and he had just watched his mate die. Past the grief, past the pain, there was the deep promise that he would protect them.

And for his strength in the past, he had always turned to shadows.

I loved my creatures. In the end, I would always listen to them for their future.

I selected midnight cave bear.

He slumped further to the ground as light overtook his fur, spiraling through the den even as Nuvja's shadows fell to blanket it; he curled in on himself, still next to the dead body of his mate, but changing. Growing.

Once he evolved, I would help guide him further below, to the fourth floor and the stone jungle within. It was a temporary solution—he wouldn't fight well in the cramped corners of the twisting tunnels, for all his shadows would help, but it was the best I could offer now. But I would carve a path for him to return above, to keep shadowed watch over his cubs, to protect them.

It was what he wanted, and as much as I would urge him to delve to deeper floors, I would not deprive him of his original home.

Just as soon as I, you know.

Finished said deeper floors.

Gods. Once I finished these evolutions and properly restocked my halls, I needed to jump head first into planning new floors. The sixth would be my coral reef, the seventh some type of forest for all my larger creatures, and then something relating to fire for the eight—you know, if I ever got time to build them all.

They didn't tell you about things like this when you became a dungeon core. Incredibly irritating.

But for now, I slipped down a floor, letting the Fungal Gardens drift back to its previous hustle and bustle as I floated my points of awareness to the Drowned Forest and all the golden treasures within. Updated from novelbIn.(c)om

Of which there were many.

I'd handled most of them—stone-backed toads into ironback toads, cave spiders into webweavers, whitecap mushrooms into lacecaps. Even more than those, though, I mourned the losses—there had been several electric eels so bursting with power, so ready to evolve, and before they'd even had a chance their lives had been cut short. I mourned them with a ferocity that honestly surprised me; but I'd collected the schema for the electric eels what felt like forever ago, back when my dungeon was small and barely growing, and they hadn't had a chance to really shine since. When they'd almost stumbled across that opportunity, it had been ripped from them.

For all that I wanted my creatures to grow and fight and thrive, sometimes there was nothing I could do. Moving them lower wouldn't help, where there were more dangers that their unevolved forms couldn't handle, and moving them up meant there wasn't enough mana to really help in their evolutions. No right answer beyond hoping that one day they would reach that intangible barrier and break through.

In a similar vein, both the greater crabs and lichenridge turtles on this floor also hadn't reached their barrier; they'd gotten close, but not each yet to what they needed. The greater crabs needed more mana than others given they were on their second evolution—kind of? They had been born into their second evolution, given both their parents were greater crabs, but apparently that counted for their own evolution? The rules were confusing—and the turtles were ambush predators that weren't supplied with targets at the same frequency as other creatures in my halls. Sure, they snapped down feet lovingly detached from legs and welcomed the mana bursting through their channels, but it wasn't enough.

Soon, though. There were a few I already had my eyes on that were looking particularly bright and growing.

But for all that the lesser creatures in the Drowned Forest were still waiting on evolutions, others were already there.

One group in particular.

The kobolds had spread out in a handful of separate hunting parties, one led by the female chieftain and others by her subordinates; for all they'd been clumsy and limited by their primitive weapons, their efficiency could not be denied. They stole swarm tactics from the burrowing rats, used the same hidden lunges as the luminous constrictors, even the raised blocks as the ironback toads—for all that they weren't trained fighters, they were infinitely more coordinated than my other monsters, and what they lacked in quality they more than made up for in quantity.

The three adventuring parties they'd attacked had all gone down.

Not flawlessly, unfortunately—of the perhaps five, six dozen kobolds I'd had, they'd lost some fifteen in the attack, and more were prone and injured around the halls. I darted to and fro, dissolving some lesser corpses for bursts of mana needed to soothe their minds and heal their wounds—scales and muscles reknitted under my careful claws, stitching back together and leaving gnarled scars in their wake.

If anything, the kobolds seemed more pleased at their newly-earned scars than the fact I was healing them, warbling excitedly as they traced their dull claws over their pockmarked arms and torsos. Foolish, but I supposed when you were a kobold, proof that you could do any fighting at all was probably welcome.

If any of them willingly tried to get more scars just to look cool, I wasn't going to heal them.

But under my curling swoops of mana, the kobolds were able to stand back up, though wincing and limping under muscles that had been pushed past exhaustion in the battle; I didn't have enough spare mana to heal them all completely, so I just carried them to the point they would be okay and then let their actual healers patch them up the rest of the way.

I wanted more mana. Infuriating not to have enough.

Then, and only then, did she walk to her own bed in the back of the den and curl up.

I pushed soothing thoughts and whispered encouragement through our bond as I selected kobold chief. Something distinctly pleased and proud echoed back as she disappeared under the glow of evolution.

The last big invasion she'd been a part of, she'd been throwing rats and sprinting away from any active combat. Gods that I would never admit it, but there was a brilliant, burning pride in my core as I watched over her, as I watched over them all.

My creatures. My lovely, lovely creatures.

And there was still one more on this floor.

Watching the kobold chief—I suppose I could call her Chieftess, so long as everyone was very, very aware that it was not a Name—had given me an idea. Seros, still on the fourth floor and bursting with power, had a stronger will than the Chieftess; it took me a second to properly convey my plan, his own thoughts drifting with a vague sense of confusion, but still he dutifully suppressed the mana crackling over his frills and padded deeper into the Jungle Labyrinth to complete my mission.

Because there was something I wanted to test.

Clearly, I could manipulate evolutions. I still remembered my hatchling days—could I still call them that when I was a rock instead of an actual hatchling?—when I'd brute-forced my whitecap mushroom into an evolution, just shoving enough mana into it until it decided that yes, it did want to evolve. Given how much mana I'd wasted even with the truly weakest plant in my dungeon, I'd decided against doing that again.

But I had influenced the evolution.

I also guessed that my shining intellect had given other options; there was no other source for my horned serpent to have unlocked her psychic abilities, and same for Seros' own intelligence. So changes I made did seemingly alert the evolutions.

Which brought me to the last message from the Drowned Forest. I hadn't read it, specifically dragging my attention away from whatever was inscribed in golden letters over my core, but I was very aware of where it led to.

A vampiric mangrove.

Tall and proud in the second room of the floor, sprawling half in and half out of the canals, broader than its brethren with dozens of knotting roots alight in jagged little thorns. It'd managed to kill one lonely little fool who'd thought she could go through this floor alone, cradling her bone-dry corpse in its roots, skin pale and ghostly white. A very fine kill, if I did say so myself, done by an equally fine tree.

This one hadn't been injured in the raid, thanks all the gods—although one of its lower branches had been removed, bark stripped by some sort of serrated blade. I spared a moment to ponder that. It looked a little too deliberate for just losing a branch to a hollow core or bad connection, but I couldn't imagine what could have possibly gotten close enough to remove a stick without also getting stabbed like the other invader.

Curious. Maybe one of the kobolds had figured out a way to use fresh wood for their spears instead of fallen branches. Their scales might have protected them.

But what mattered was the power I felt lurking beneath its bark.

This tree was special in ways that I was only now starting to realize.

I'd long had a suspicion that something was happening on my second floor, which had been sent from suspicion into actively noticing when I'd caught Chieftess talking to a mangrove—this specific mangrove, actually.

This specific mangrove that had, when I'd last noticed it, been back at the kobold's den.

The kobold's den that was half a floor away.

Yeah. That didn't just happen by coincidence.

Trees were, rather famously, stationary beings—but vampiric mangroves weren't the trees I was familiar with. They were much more ancient, coming from the Old World, and I'd been a fool to treat them like any old plant. I was learning that lesson now with the armoured jawfish and the sarco crocodile, who needed special care to keep them alive in a world that had already managed to kill them before, and now once more I could fight through it with the mangroves.

Somehow, this plant was talking and thinking and moving, and Rhoborh's boon had rapidly sped up whatever it had planned. So.

Henceforth why I was very, very determinedly not looking at its evolution options yet. I had a theory, and a theory that needed to be tested, and a choice that had to be made.

With a low rumble, Seros pulled himself out of the canal, shaking water off his dazzling scales—literally dazzling, considering that their sea-green colour was hidden under an incandescent light. He was moving stiffly, not with injuries considering that I'd already healed them, but with the sheer effort of holding back all the mana that begged and pleaded and leapt at the chance to evolve him. I wasn't pleased at asking him to hold back just to help me, but he was the only one who could both understand me well enough and traverse all my floors to do so. Even then, I sent a burst of apology through our shared connection.

He crooned back his acceptance around the corpse in his mouth.

Because if I wanted to help my mangrove evolve, I just so happened to have two invaders who had provided very helpful corpses.

Seros spat the body of the dryad onto the mangrove's roots.

She was near bisected, entrails split and stinking, mossy green skin splattered with red both old and new, eyes glassy and distant; but a pure blooded dryad. Southern variant, I thought, which would help more given a mangrove's inherently tropical nature. I urged Seros with another series of instructions and he padded off to a nearby room, where the other corpse I wanted was—not a true dryad, but a human with dryadic ancestry. Hopefully that would be enough.

It took a little effort, considering Seros had claws and these were small, fragile little bodies, but eventually he got them both wrapped around the mangrove's base. No reaction from it yet, just the shift of its branches in the cloudskipper wisps' wind, but I'd expected that. Evolution tended to flatten out any thoughts from my creatures, and this was a full plant who had only just started to break over the barrier of awareness.

But hopefully after this, it would be something more.

So I reached down and dissolved both the corpses.

They exploded into motes of white-silver light, but I didn't let it flow into my core just yet—I shoved outward, forcing the motes into the scarlet-red bark. Just as it had with the whitecap mushroom all those months ago, most of it splashed uselessly off, drifting away in eddying spirals—but some entered the mangrove and stayed there. Influenced it.

I waited a breathless second as the last of the mana faded away, points of awareness arrowed in on the tree. No visible reaction, but.

But.

But maybe the evolution message had changed.

With excitement thrumming through my core strong enough that even Seros could feel it, I finally read what it said.

Your creature, a Vampiric Mangrove, is undergoing evolution!

Please select your desired path.

Fungal Mangrove (Uncommon): It spreads in a sprawling, shambling growth, leeching roots through stone and soil and sea alike. Needing no light, there is nothing that can stop its encroaching habit, devouring the land before it in endless waves of green.

Bloodhunt Mangrove (Exotic): No longer will passive thorns satiate its thirst. Its roots grow and spread as living whips, lashing for anything that moves, disguised as simple foliage until they choose to strike and drag its victims back to be pierced by countless thorns.

Vampiric Dryad (Exotic): This Ancestral Tree is one of death and consequence, and so too is its servant. It stalks the world for blood to deliver back to its home, armed with piercing fangs and the loyalty that brings empire to their knees.

A-fucking-ha.

Did my trick with the corpses do anything? Gods if I knew.

But either way, I'd gotten exactly what I wanted.

Was it even a choice? The fungal mangrove would be something I would bring down to my fourth floor to swallow the tunnels in another devastating threat, and the bloodhunt mangrove would pair absolutely beautifully with the silvertooths in the canals, but they were simple, fleeting things in comparison to the absolute glory of the last option.

I burned with a fierce, brilliant hunger as I selected vampiric dryad.