Chapter 34 - Developing The Foundations

The space that soon would house the spiders' utopia was already hollowed out partially, which made things a lot easier for me. To create the perfect environment for the aranea that were soon to inhabit the depths I consulted with Arthur himself about what would be perfect for the spider human hybrids.

Over a day of discussion brewed down in me having to get rid of the whole plan, I was prematurely creating in my mind. At first, I wanted to create a large hollow space even larger than the 7th zone though my idea was totally shut down by Arthur. He explained to me the perfect environment of the arachnid race, especially what the aranea would need to have the most advantage over adventurers or other races inside the zone.

Similar to the first Zone, the Mouse Kingdom, he had me hollow out various tunnels opening up in caverns of different sizes and shapes. The only thing that was different from the first zone was the sheer size, the 9th looked to be going into totally different dimensions.

Though the 9th wasn’t just an upscale copy of the first and I was able to add some more interesting and magical environments when Arthur wasn’t looking at the screen I projected. The system of tunnels and caves was quickly forming to become a labyrinth of colossal size, though one thing still bothered me, it was not enough.

For a zone, so deep inside my dungeon, it should have something special differentiating it from others I build earlier. Up till now it simply was a large mouse kingdom zone that was going to be inhabited with spiders, but I wanted something to make it special.

After Arthur had given me all the advice he had regarding the environment I should build he left me alone for the day and I continued on, not needing any sleep due to my injury being healed by the evolution.

During the sleepless night, I thought about ways I could transform the zone from something boring and miscellaneous into something magical and mythical. Trying to find ideas I slowly floated through my dungeon and the area of influence permeating the surrounding subterranean kingdom.

Once I was a bit farther into the still wild regions surrounding my dungeon I manifested my avatar in the Displacer Kantast form and teleported around the dark area. Not a lot of beasts wandered these plains of darkness due to the draugr setting up runes to scare them off. Though some of the weirder beasts still lived a quiet life in the abandoned wilderness, adapting to the scarce food supply and expansive area.

All of the different aspects combined in this exact moment were what bore in me the idea that would transform the 9th zone from normal to fantastical. The space-contorting form of the Displacer Kantast, the cornerstones with the runes from the draugr, and the weird forms of the scarce animals in the quiet environment.

I immediately flew back to the dungeon, wanting to test my theory immediately, I was so focused on my objective that I forgot I was still in my manifested form, Scaring the townpeople and angering the guards when I made my way through the town center of the dwarves‘ capital.

Arriving in the dungeon I instantly go to work. Throughout the relatively boring cave system, I created interesting rooms of drastically different themes. Each one would house a cornerstone, protected by the traps and inhabitants of the various rooms. Every cornerstone would be able to shift around the whole cave system in a specific way so that with the right pattern an adventurer would be able to make his way through the labyrinth undisturbed

The Process and system behind the riddle could be compared to shuffling a deck of cards. Every time a cornerstone was pressed the deck would be shuffled in a specific way, coming back into the original position after shuffling the deck for long enough. The adventurer had to try different cornerstones and apply different shuffling techniques on the deck to order it in the right way. Difficulty being, that the adventurer never knew the true position of the cards and could only guess the right order by exploring the cave-system over and over.

Raising the difficulty of reaching the cornerstones, needed to shuffle the deck in the right way, were various traps and difficult terrain making the journey close to impossible. Especially considering the main threat, the aranea, would permeate the whole floor and create a sticky and chaotic mess out of the already confusing maze. All in All, I planted 10 cornerstones all around the Zone, which would have the adventurers exploring the whole area over and over before they would even get close to escaping the zone.

While testing the zone to see if everything worked like I imagined it to I came upon some problems. The first issue was that the zone, even though the idea was quite ingenious, was quite boring to explore, especially considering the adventurers would make their way through the zone multiple times per run.

To mitigate this problem and create some landmarks that would help the divers in solving the spatial puzzle I created various environments, themed around the cornerstones that were positioned in each area. This would allow the adventurers to group together various rooms and tunnels and make the puzzle just a tiny bit easier.

Though not only this, while shuffling the zone around the various themed rooms would mix and mingle with each other, creating fantastical environments not seen anywhere else. With the basic idea working and tested, I was ready for the next phase of dungeon building, decoration.

With the zone split into 10 different themes, I created environments fitting the topic of each cornerstone.

The First Cornerstone, “Sea of Shadow”, was wrought in the liquid shadow I picked up from the “Shadowliquid Grassland” during my journey in which I met Arthur. The heavy gas-filled to the brim with shadow mana not only obstructed the view and rendered even torches unusable, but it too slowly got into the adventurers' minds.

Originating from the fumes of the Draugr rune industry, the substance was not something to be toyed with, especially considering its sentient nature. A large amount of mana inside of my dungeon, together with some careful cultivation allowed me to jumpstart the shadows' evolution into a real creature. I got the idea from the “Shadowliquid Grasslands” where I observed the gas's slow development into a living and thinking creature.

Though to make the “Sea of Shadow” at least somewhat traversable to the target group and not only some monstrous adventurers, I didn’t cultivate the whole liquid shadow inside the area. A creature resulting from the whole mass of the gas inside the area even scared me a little and was enough to convince me to use the new creature sparingly.

This didn’t mean that the area wasn’t worth the time it took to carefully raise the mysterious creature. Starting out at Tier 5, the Liquid shadow permeated the smallest tunnels of the “Sea of Shadow”. The Closer one got to the cornerstone, roughly in the zones center, the higher the evolution of the creatures would get.

The next evolution of the liquid shadow split the creature up into two paths, the Gooey Shadow and the Liquid Umbra. The first of the two evolved into the direction of slimes after living at the bottom of the area tunnel, with the thickest and heaviest shadows. The main thing differentiating it from its sibling, the Liquid umbra, a darker and larger form of the Tier 5 progenitor, was its consistency. While the Liquid- Shadow or Umbra was more like really light water flowing around the tunnels, the gooey Shadow was like a large droplet of gelatinous water.

The Tier 6 Liquid Umbra then further evolved into an aqueous umbra and then into a Tier 8 adumbration, creating the maze guardian of the area. While the aqueous umbra was just an all-around stronger and larger form of its Tier 6 counterpart, the Adumbration was something special.

It was a combination evolution of the further evolved Gooey Shadow, the Black Pudding, an acidic and larger form of the previous Tier. The Adumbration had no real body, it was a combination of the watery form of the Aqueous Umbra and the gelatinous form of the Black Pudding combined with the space-mana from the cornerstone.

This created a monster not before seen on the face of the world. It was as if the creature actually didn’t really exist, it was more of an ephemeral idea or concept than a real being. The para-real body combined with the space mana and maze-guardian role resulted in an interesting creature.

Around 20(65) to 30(100) meters (feet) in radius, the creature was on the larger end of the ones I created. All the different factors influencing its evolution brought forth a mind-bending creature, literately not figuratively. The Creature had some limited oracle abilities, combined with some kind of future-mind-bending, allowing it to change the decisions of people so the future the creature would want would come true.

This would make the dive through the “Sea of Shadows” even more difficult than it was before because every time an adventurer would decide to go down the right path, in the last second, he would decide to go the other way instead. Though not only did this special ability make the travel towards the creature quite difficult, but fighting it was a challenge on another level.

Even though the creature was on the lower end of Tier 8, it would be a fatal mistake to underestimate the Adumbration. By manipulation, the party into missing this swing there or blinking just then, the nicely planned out fight would quickly resolve into a mess for the attacking party. It was as If you not only fought against a person who knew your every move from the get-go but too was able to manipulate you into making the worst possible decisions.

I was already excited to see how the coming adventurer parties would deal with the intriguing creature but had to take my mind of thinking up impossible plans, I still had 9 areas to plan out.

Next on the list was a revisit on a day I had years ago when building the 7th zone. Back then I had experimented around with elementals of various affinities but didn’t use the creatures in the end. This was a missed opportunity, that now fueled the theme for the next zone.

Contrary to all the other zones and areas I had built up to now, where I mostly concentrated on what could be seen, the environment, in this area, I took care of the unseen.

From afar the cave would look like any other, just a slight bit more vibrant and inviting. Caverns, tunnels, and rooms of various sizes, with close to no living creature in sight, a bit weird, considering every part of the world was inhabited something, but not all too concerning. A mistake that the adventurers would pay dearly for.

Living further inside the cave, where the higher amount of mana than normal, was at its thickest, weird creatures would float around. With a closer look, any adventurer worth his money would quickly identify these mana-fueled beasts as elementals, living amongst the thick mana. Ranging from the size of a dog to that of a watchtower, every size of cave and cavern found its perfect inhabitants.

Most of the elementals were mainly of the earth attribute, though some were a combination of it with another minor affinity, resulting in a mess of different shapes and forms. They ranged from Tier 5 Major earth elementals and Tier 7 Concentrated force elementals. Or the groups of Tier 4 Clustermentals that shared their living space with the shadow-earth affinity Terraterror Elemetal of Tier 7.

The closer someone got to the cornerstone standing in the zones center the heavier the slowly increasing mana-poisoning would affect them. Some rare creatures adapted to the insane mana levels and were able to live in areas far above their logical threshold. The Clustermentals were an example of this, they used their large numbers to split the large amounts of man between them. Another subject of this category would also be the twimental at Tier 6, this creature had one of its twins in a low mana area and the other one at an extremely high mana area. They split the load between them and created an early threat to any opportunistic adventurers venturing in areas they did not yet belong into.

Though most creatures that called the centermost area their home were not of these niche categories but rather were all part of one singular group, the fundamentals. The suffocating amount of earth mana in the “Elemental Plain”’s center pushed out all other affinities and bore the purest of beings. Tier 7 peak Terra Fundamentals and Tier 8 weak lesser Gravity fundamentals were not a rare sight in these areas not meant for any mana-born creature.

Guarding the cornerstone at the epicenter of the area was a creature at another level to those before it. At Tier 8 peak the Eartsence Fundamental was the purest form of earth mana I had ever seen. The mana inside the creature also reminded me of something else. The mana inside the creature was in a similar state as when a creature evolved into the next Tier, and this made me take a closer look at it.

I knew for sure that the Eartsence Fundamental was not about to evolve because the next Tier was solely reserved for my last boss, that I had to yet elevate into the next Tier. With the possibility of an evolution of the creature itself of the table, I had to take a closer look at the state the mana was in.

After taking a closer look I noticed a key fact. If a creature was close to evolution the mana inside its core and body would form a specific pattern, though this was not what I saw here. Small clusters off mana around a centimeter (0,4 inches) in width clustered closer together and began to create a pattern.

Looking around the cornerstone I saw the process in the further progression just above the cornerstones mana output. This led me to believe that this process had something to do with the density of the mana. To accelerate the evolution of the mana I created a separate space close to my core and pumped it full with earth mana, the most abundant in the area.

After pumping the amount of man needed to summon a Tier 9 into a space of once centimeter the evolution finally took place. An hour later and a wave of force originating from the evolution’s epicenter I was rewarded by a single particle of Rock-Mana.

The power behind this single-particle was double the energy it needed to evolve, sparking a mischievous idea inside my core. What if I used this mana evolution to create free energy, with no strings attached. In my mind, I imagined myself drunk on mana creating zone after zone without having to wait for a month or even years.

Though, before I could get started with the creation of a facility that would automate the mana evolution an unimaginable pain threatened to shatter my mind!!!!!