Chapter 27 - A god with admin

I wasn't too worried about the adventurers coming towards me. I mean, if you did basic 4th grade math then in 3 weeks I'll have about 300 DP and 30,000 mana to use. With that much mana, I could probably just pay them off. Though I would rather not appear too weak in front of people who could potentially kill me.

Preferably I could enter a good relationship with the adventurer guilds, coming to some form of mutually beneficial agreement. The second best thing would be them not getting involved at all with me and allowing me to exist in peace but that doesn't seem all too likely right now.

The worst scenarios would be getting turned into a slave or dying. If I would have to choose out of those two scenarios than being a slave might be best. I'm one of those immortal unless killed species so as long as I can tough things out and outlast them then I'll be good in the long run. As a wise man once said, you die when you're killed. Which applies to me perfectly.

Well, there's no real point in worrying about future possibilities when you can do nothing about it. I've been working on a plan for the dungeon based on my previous estimated budget but I'm lacking some inspiration right now and like a normal person I can't work on a thing for over 5 hours without getting somewhat bored. Goblin has returned to experimenting with herbs after a celebratory dance and Penny is rereading my books.

Some strange things have happened in my dungeon though. For one the lesser dryad that got basic nature magic has been growing random plants everywhere. A room has already been completely filled with plants. They were all normal plants with nothing really special about them. I'm told this is normal for lesser dryads so I'll just let it be for now.

And secondly, all the insect carapaces and exoskeletons I have dumped around my dungeon have all disappeared. I have checked everywhere in my dungeon and they were just, gone. I suspect it was the ants. I saw a soldier ant going out into the cave with a suspiciously grey coloration which reminded me of the giant centipede which first invaded my dungeon.

Did the ants eat the exoskeletons and somehow took on its characteristics? I checked every ants' status and I found a strange glitched title on the queen ant. It's completely written in random symbols. This is the second time I have encountered something like this, the first being my own status page. It's similar to the skill I have or the bracketed thing next to my empty name on my own status screen. Unlike mine, it swaps the symbols every second, as if it's undecided on what it wants to be.

I decided to keep quiet on this since I lack too much information about it. I suspect it has something to do with me since I also have similarly glitched looking things in my status and I am the master of this ant so you can't say we're unrelated, not only that, the ant got a title, something which I have been bombarded with since I was born. There is definitely some relation between me and this glitched title.

After I found this title I have been tightly observing the queen ant and it is eating way more than it should. It eats hundreds of times of its own weight and then births a huge number of larvae. Not only that, it's constantly eating and birthing new ants. How did I not notice that before? If it has been doing this for a while then there could be tens of thousands of ants running around in that cave outside. In fact, I won't be surprised if that cave is empty of everything except ants. Given how quickly the queen is making new ants and the multitudes of corpses the ants are bringing back. Heck! If I don't rear theses ants in I could cause a mass extinction!

Wait... I could use this. This is literally all I've ever wanted from a hive queen. With all the ants it's making I probably don't need to ever purchase another ant. And wasn't the whole point of these guys to swarm someone to death? I mean why duel when you could lynch? I'll let the ant queen continue on as before, I have no idea what the details of her title is, however, it has something to do with eating and having a lot of babies. Since the ants are still bringing back cave creatures I'll let them continue on since I don't think I can even remotely begin to feed the queen using just my own mana. There's already a large number of workers farming the mushrooms leftover from my first real battle and I see hundreds of ants return from the cave every day, carrying various spoils. I have set my dungeon absorption ability off automatic so all of the stuff has been eaten by the queen.

But right now I should figure out a way to incorporate all these ants into the dungeon. These ants are loyal to me as long as they're in the dungeon, so I'll have to expand outwards into the cave or wait for them to come back by themselves if I want to use them. I think expansion is perhaps the best investment right now. The added area boosts my mana regeneration and given all the potential new species I know I could get from an already working ecosystem, well formerly. I have no idea how my ants have screwed up the local ecosystem but they probably have if you follow precedent from my old world.

Surprisingly, expansion is rather easy. I open up my Dungeon Control Panel, selecting Expansion and a grid of green and black squares appears. The green is my claimed territory and the black is unclaimed land. After I figured out which direction the cave is I began expanding by tapping on the unclaimed squares and then selecting yes after a prompt. After claiming the first square, I looked into the cave for additional pathways so that I know which direction I should continue expanding. Repeating this I claimed about 200 meters of the cave. Which cost me about 1000 mana, a third of what I had. Since the resulting claimed territory ended in a few separate branches, I claimed the spaces in between the branches, costing me another 500 mana, so that I had a more connected shape. Surprisingly, it seemed that expanding cost less if the unclaimed square were next to more claimed squares.

Looking into the cave, my ants weren't as dominant as I thought. Their influence only spread about 50 meters from the entrance. Due to the many predators that exist. The most prominent is a huge anteater looking thing that has made its nest 80 meters into the cave. Since it's large and only feeds on ants or other similar sized stuff, most larger creatures just avoid or ignore it. I'll deal with it later because if there's nothing to control the ant population then it'll end up being a huge problem not only to the ecosystem but also to me. Who do you think feeds these guys if material food fails? If I kill this predator then my only options are to have them rapidly expand to feed their growing population, have them cull their own kin, or just let them starve to death.

The cave had a main path which leads to the anteater, but before it reaches the anteater there are two branching pathways to the left and right. The right one leads to a dead end, the other continues on. I can see the remains of a former colony in the dead end which was probably where the attacking ants came from. I'm guessing that these ants met my ants early on, but were eventually pushed back through numbers until they got completely killed off.

The ants I managed to claim from this weren't any to scoff at. 5000 worker ants and 2000 soldier ants, there's still only one royal guard ant and he is staying with the queen. I have no idea what the conditions are for a royal guard ant, the amount I could have may be limited, or there is some other condition I have yet to grasp, regardless, I only have a single royal guard class ant.

Well now that I have most my chores done, I suppose I'll go check out Forums since I haven't been there for a while.

Main Thread

Eternity Ice Temple: LIKE I SAID! ELVES HAVE THE BEST BODY!!

Fortress of the Sky: Foolish Ice, Naga's clearly triumph as a mother. Their protective instincts for their young is impossibly high.

Eternity Ice Temple: So you want to bed a naga?

Fortress of the Sky: ...

Void God Dungeon: HOW LONG ARE YOU TWO GOING TO TAKE UP THE MAIN THREAD!! GET OUT OF HERE!!

System Message: [Void God Dungeon] has server muted [Fortress of the Sky] and [Eternity Ice Temple] from the Main Thread for [5 Weeks]

Undead King's Castle: The God has appeared!

Undead King's Castle: The Heavens do have eyes! Justice has been served!

Cave of Desire: Three cheers for Senior Void! Three cheers for freeing the main thread!

Palace of Seven Hells: Finally.

Demon Town Dungeon: Wow, someone actually managed to piss off Void.

What the hell? There's admin in this system?