Argent awoke in a warm amber light, suspended and weightless. It was divinely comfortable. Stretching her limbs, she found she felt amazing, invigorated. There was not the tiniest shred of exhaustion in her entire being. Instead energy suffused her form, urging her to move, to break free of this containment. It was fading, the light giving way and depositing her into the grassy floor of the Gardens.

She was reborn.

And all around her there was chaos. Blood, dying creatures, dead intruders.

It figures.

She looks away for one moment, and the Maker is in trouble. Personally, she chose to blame the human in the corner. In her experience this was definitely a human’s fault.

Argent wriggled her nose. It was strange. She could feel the Maker’s thoughts, as usual, but there was more now. There was...

You have consumed a powerful soul and created - Blessing of the Steel Dancer

Born from true warrior’s spirit, this Blessing grants increased intellect and grace, as well as affinity with blades.

I was quite pleased, even before the message popped in to inform me I’d claimed a Blessing as an added prize. Out of ten invaders a single survivor and a single captive. Eight souls devoured. A surfeit of Mana to reap from the dead.

Already my minions had torn into the corpses, eager to get their taste of flesh before I consumed the lion’s share. Even if they could survive off Mana alone, the urge and desire to feed remained, and they were adorably bloodthirsty critters all. Even the fisherman spiders who’d had such a poor showing today wanted to kill.

Yes yes, they wanted to rip and tear. I beamed approving waves of warm emotion through the whole of the Dungeon. They had done well today.

And Argent!

Argent was gorgeous. Her coat was the color of true silver now, and a misty, clinging haze of light followed her as she moved, making her look exactly like the moon on a cloudless night. But incredibly, through my connection to her mind I could now hear the thoughts of every one of the rats in my Dungeon.

It was awe-inspiring. Like a web of thoughts, a vast interconnection in which individuals minds existed like islands in a sea of emotion and memory, ‘waves’ washing from one little outcropping of individuality to the next whenever a particularly strong thought filled one mind.

It was slightly difficult to describe or envision but it seemed natural to her, taking her no effort to sort through this sea of noise, to speak and to hear to one mind or another within the crowd.

And it wasn’t just thoughts. Their Mana too was interlinked, allowing her to draw from any of the rats within her coven. I could sense the power of magic within her, although I couldn’t yet tell what it would become.

The Sun was the power of fortune, of fate. Of singular shining heroes.

The Moon was the many, the massed and luckless.

She commanded her horde to come out, to search the invaders for trinkets and gems. I left their clothes and possessions behind as I devoured the flesh within. Even with all the little chunks my creation had taken, the Mana flooding through me was immense, enough to reach Overflow.

Not once, but twice.

Everything blanked as a vortex began to form, pulling the ethereal Mana that defined my domain inwards. A long moment of total sensory silence followed.

When I returned to consciousness, a flaming soul shard hung in the air, and a notification hovered within my sea of consciousness.

You have created - Reincarnation of Jewels

In life, this soul was a jeweler, entranced by the beauty of gems. They spent their life polishing and cutting with loving care. For this true devotion, they have been preserved through death and called to your Dungeon to serve.

A jeweler. Of all the things I needed from the human realms, a jeweler was second only to someone who could teach me proper spellcraft. The soul hung in the air, breath-takingly brilliant but invisible to human eyes, and I found I could manipulate it by wrapping my Mana around the tiny flame.

I knew precisely what I would do with it.

The nacre-spider I’d given a shard was returning, hauling me a silk-wrapped gift. I pressed the flaming soul into its skull. The spider stopped, dropping its wriggling parcel, and swayed as it stood, slowly lifting onto its hindquarters to paw the air with its two front legs.

Then it caught sight of how thin, how inhuman its legs were. How they were coated in a thin layer of hardened pearlescent spittle that turned them into deadly blades.

My view inside the nacre-spiders mind was hilarious. Because in that moment, a human consciousness was waking up to discover itself inside the body of an enormous spider, and like most humans, it hadn’t been born with the aesthetic sense to appreciate the eight-legged form.

In fact, this particular human was terrified of spiders.

I watched with great amusement as the spider thrashed and flailed, trying to escape its own skin. At the same time, the mind of the spider was still in there, slowly melding with the human, granting them new instincts, new and arachnid ways of thinking. It was like watching oil mix with water. The human would probably be slightly mad by the end of being mentally grafted to its own worst nightmare.

I took pity on it. It had the Mana stored up already, and a slight push from me was enough to trigger its evolution. Amber light encased the two struggling minds and pushed them into placid dreams while they slowly fused together. Hopefully that would keep my new acquisition from totally cracking under the pressure.

One of the fisherman spiders had also reached the threshold, and retreated into a quiet den to experience transformation.

I would tend to them in a moment’s time. For now, I had to focus on restoring my Dungeon to readiness, reseeding populations and reforming the mangrove orchard.

I began to work.

Clearly, there were improvements to be made. The fisherman spiders needed an ally in the mangrove orchards, and the jewel spiders and reelfish weren’t quite up to the task. I could use a fast, deadly assailant to chase down fleeing invaders, if I wanted to avoid escapees like that old dwarf. I had plenty to do.

But I chose to focus on the rats.

With Argent’s evolution every rat in my Dungeon had received a massive upgrade, nearly equivalent to a shard. Only a small amount of modification was needed to make them into a formidable force.

I started with a black rat, a brawny little bull of a rodent with a surly temper that I admired. I gave him a modification I’d used before, on my short-lived falcon. I added a hooked talon to the back of his forepaws that contained a tiny venom sac, and poured Mana into intensifying the toxins within until they could cause serious harm to a human.

Next, I went to work on a white rat, one of my very first creations. One that had survived since the beginning of the Dungeon through the flood and the constant cycles of prey and predator. A veteran. I made her even more capable of survival by turning her bones soft, allowing her to squeeze through the tiniest crack. I gave her padded suckerfeet inspired by the lizards within my territory, allowing her to climb straight up sheer surface, and finally, I made her tail longer and prehensile, adding a tiny sheen of sticky mucus that would allow her to pick things up easily.

My final addition would be among my most delicate creations. I didn’t take an already existing creature and modify it, but spun one out of whole cloth, manifesting it from pure Mana to take on my desired form. Mostly rat, yes, but with a hint of spider. It had eight legs cloaked in chitin, and several overlapping plates of the shiny black stuff ran down its back. Thinner and more streamlined than its kin, it looked almost centipedal.

And it had, in place of a tail, an abdomen with a spinneret. A weaving rat. A rat that could create bridges, rappelling lines, whatever the ratty crew required.

It was not, I had to admit, my prettiest creation.

But if I had any of the necessary body parts, I would be patting myself on the back for the sheer ingenuity of my work. Call it inspiration out of chaos.

[ Blightclaw Rat ]

Armed with venomous stingers, this deadly creation can fell creatures many times its own size and make even humans writhe in pain at the taste of its claws.

[ Wallflower Rat ]

With devilish flexibility and able to scale any surface with its special grip, this rodent is a daredevil of escapes and infiltrations.

[ Webweaver Vermin ]

A hideous crossbreed, this chimera is born to skulk in shadows and weave foul schemes.

And as my new creations set out to find their niche in my Dungeon, I noticed an old friend creeping through the doorway to the Everforest...