“That quickly? What did you get?”

“Here you go, I’m sending down a hedgehog with some spores for you. You can grow some truffles and boletus mushrooms.”

“That’s amazing!”

As excited as Cara was about the mushrooms, Brick was far more ecstatic. It was like comparing a candle to a wildfire, he was literally bouncing off the walls in excitement.

“Get to it then! Mushrooms aren’t gon’ to grow em selves are they!” It wasn’t a question. Apparently the fae folk had a severe love of mushrooms. It was uncanny if Cara was being honest with herself. Finally, she understood why the fairies were associated with rings of mushrooms so frequently. Brick was already talking about a giant mutant mushroom forest where he could carve out a home and fill it with booby traps.

“Soup, fried, kebabs, seared, roasted, creamed, even stews! Cara this is going to be amazing! Do you know what kind of fire bombs or airborne traps we can breed into the fungi?”

There was no way she was going to be able to concentrate with Brick like this, so she tuned him out and got to work. She had her crunchers spread the spores throughout the cavern and swarmed the tiny seeds with mana. Her first concern was quantity over evolution, which was easy enough.

The truffles had a bit more trouble growing than the boletus, but after she increased the ratio of earth mana they caught up quickly. The first room of her second floor was covered in mushrooms in no time, with the air a cloud of spores re-released and ready to circulate.

She continued to populate the second floor with the fungal menace, and even allowed some of the spores to float back up to the first floor. Now that she had enough material to work with, it was time to start focusing on forcing evolutions.

As a bottom feeder, the fungus needed very little to evolve and by pumping out increasing amounts of ambient mana the mushrooms were already capped out on power. So, after three hours of preparation it was time to start her experiments.

Quickly she pinged Manning to look in on the process as she had decided to give him a bit of a magic lesson as thanks.

“So, because we are linked we both have access to the same schools of mana when it comes to dungeon processes. Magic functions in six primary schools. Their relationship looks a lot like the natural form of a dungeon core, a hexagon. Dark magic on the top, with Light its direct opposite. On the left side of Dark is Earth magic and Water magic leads up the right side. These two are opposed by Air and Fire respectively. This makes up what the sapients refer to as Tier 1 affinities, a fitting name.

“Most sapient races are born with a single school of magic on the first tier, although they are occasionally born with access to a second affinity, and even more rarely they are born with a tier 2 affinity. sapients are also usually born with active or passive access to magic. Those born with active in tier 1 can work to access the affinities on either side of their own. Example, I am a Dark magus, so I have minor affinities in Water and Earth.”

“So, nature is a Tier 2 affinity, right? What can I learn Cara?” It was Manning’s first question this entire time, and Cara was extremely impressed. When they’d first arrived in the world he’d barraged her with so many questions that she couldn’t even think straight. He was doing a really good job constraining his curiosity, listening well and even asking the correct questions. All in all, she thought that he would have made a great apprentice to any mage were he still alive. Well, in a sapient body rather than a near god level entity residing in a stone.

“Well, every tier 2 school of magic is composed of the primary 6. Nature is a blend of Earth, Water, and Air, so you have minor affinities in each of those with increased efficiency working with Nature. I can’t be sure, but I believe that our overlap increases our potential giving us both full capabilities with Earth and Water.”

“That explains why it’s so much easier than trying to work with Air mana.”

“Yes, and please don’t interrupt this next part it’s going to take a lot of concentration. When you first came into the world as a core you were absorbing earth mana and converting it. You can do the same process backwards with any of our affinities to evolve a creature in the dungeon. This allows you to force evolutions down different paths for your creatures.”

“You said that we needed to work to unlock other affinities though, why do we know them naturally?”

“Right, I went right past that. I don’t know. I talked with Brick about it, and he wasn’t sure either, but we did some guessing. Our best estimate is that dungeons are born with their natural affinity and secondary affinities unlocked so that the sapients can better process mana. Otherwise a fire mage would only be able to dive in a fire dungeon to increase his elemental affinity. Still, no more questions for now or my charitable feeling might wane.”

The next several hours were spent painstakingly trying to force evolutions in the fungus, allowing minor successes to repopulate, culling the failures, and repeating. After the first hour or so Manning expressed his gratitude before recalling his consciousness to his own domain and practicing. In the end Cara was very happy with the results.

It was unrealistic to expect the fungus to develop combat abilities. You couldn’t just spend a day or two pumping mushrooms full of mana and expect them to shoot spikes at people, that would just be ridiculous. Instead she used her earth mana to increase the size, water to make them more flexible, and darkness to camouflage them.

Her goal was to make the mushrooms more mana enriched for the consumption of her creatures. They were naturally able to absorb mana at a much higher rate than anything she had, much like a sponge, and would help expedite the more complex evolutions of her beasts when worked into their diet.

She did have a couple hiccups, accidental successes, where the mushrooms gained different capabilities. Some of the truffles adopted a numbing poison when ingested, and a strain of boletus mushrooms gained a sort of stunning quality to their spores. She assumed that it was a natural evolution to protect the mushrooms from their predators. She kept them around and shared the successes with Manning, hoping that he could adapt them to the surface somehow as well.

She was admiring the different colonies of fungus on the walls of the first chamber on floor two, very satisfied with the days work. It was the most progress she’d made since establishing the dungeon, and Manning said he’d had a similarly good day.

A clanking noise drew her attention to one of the walls, a hollow thumping noise. She recognized the wall as the hallway she’d sealed off when her scouts went missing, and the thumping was coming from the opposite side of the wall. Feeling a slight panic, she called all her combat ready bats and spiders into the room, ready for combat.

Her minions circled the wall in their battle stances, the wall began to crumble, and a stone hammer crushed its way into the chamber.