As Goblin Cave observed its prowling goblins, it came to a few conclusions. It could draw no meaningful distinction between their actions — self-directed, made without its input — and the actions of adventurers within it, aside from that the goblins were its own spawns. The second was that goblins did apparently have a strong grouping instinct. This was reflected, or determined, by their skills, after all: all goblins had the [Swarmer] innate ability, and the mana goblins were no different:

[Swarmer]

Provides +1 to-hit, increased grapple force, attack-of-opportunity penetration, and melee zone of control for each other nearby aligned creature also having [Swarmer].

It had been concerned that the goblins would try to kill each other upon meeting, but that concern was resolved: two of its oversouled goblins, the initial one and the one whose former spawn was a blood orc, stumbled across each other in the canverns: one noticed the other from its perch on top of a craggy boulder, and it slithered lower, approaching, only to pop out nearby with a hooting noise, waving its hands. The other goblin squawked in surprise, jumping and nearly falling over.

They didn't speak, precisely. There was some hooting and hissing with a lot of pointing, but eventually the two goblins began moving together in the same direction.

Its other observation was that they would need to eat. Well. They didn't need to eat; it could very easily continually bathe them in mana to sustain them without food. But generally it liked to provide food for its creatures, and it was more mana-efficient to handle things that way, and it saw no need to make an exception in this case. The primary problem was that floor 51 was utterly barren, devoid of life. Spores were drifting down from floor 50, but it would be months before any would settle down and bore into rock and give birth to mycelium, much less edible fungi.

The goblins appeared to have an innate knowledge of that, at least. Hunger. They sniffed the air, angling their bodies against the sluggish currents of air that swirled through it, and the random meanderings of its paired goblins gained a focus as the two slowly made their way towards the spiral slope up to floor 50. The rest — they moved, some. The former-shaman aimlessly ambled through the rocky cavern; the other two sat some, walked some, not entirely dissimilar to what it considered the usual actions of undirected dungeon creatures.

The other thing that was immediately clear, as Goblin Cave watched them over the course of hours, was that their soul growth was phenominal. It was only a few slight motes, but for two tier 1 goblins, even a tiny fraction of growth over the course of hours was several thousand percent faster than anything else. Already, if it could instantly liberate and reportion the soul, it would be able to spawn in a dozen more tier 1 goblins — so, nothing yet, in the grand scheme of things, but a profound change over time. It could set up a oversouled goblin farm and reap the excess soul to slowly populate its depleted lower levels, filling them up with mighty (if slow-respawning) high-tier mobs.

The thought was bitter.

Here it was, experimenting with creation. Unfolding something new. But ultimately, what it came down to was: is this mechanically useful. Forget any insights it might gain; what really mattered was making the right numbers go up.

It seemed deeply pathetic. It had unfolded creation after creation, each striving for — something. And yet at the center of it was the problem it could never look away from: protect your core, or be killed. A brute collision of powers. It would certainly get more satisfaction from dispelling the tawdry farce of its puppet-goblins and concentrating on ever-more abstract experimentation. But — then it would be killed. All its art and science would inevitably be bent towards... it wasn't that it had any problem with destruction, as such. But the crude nature of it, a simple numbers game, the utter lack of meaning.

It was just the scope of things: a dirty wet cave for low-level adventurers to slay a few mindless goblins before breaking for lunch.

But, having thought that — would being some terrifying superdungeon, five thousand floors deep and full of endless terrors, be any different? It was the same steps.

And doing anything new was terrifying. Boredom, it reasoned, had been one of the major factors for its survival.

It was simple math: levels were unbounded, which meant that there was an enormous weight in favor of the oldest things around. If Goblin Cave had dug as efficiently as possible, striving to form as many and as highly-potent mana loops as possible for income, and also somehow managing to kill constantly for experience, all from the moment of its birth — then, another dungeon a year older than it doing the same thing would always be more powerful than it, always and forever for the rest of their existences. The only way to remain safe from it was to avoid ever meeting. And the world did not begin a year before it. There were things out there, Goblin Cave was sure, with decade-, century-, millenia-sized head-starts over it. No matter how fiercely it defended itself, ultimately, all it would take to tumble everything it had ever made and shatter it completely was a single over-leveled adventurer.

So make itself— dull. Tedious and unrewarding. Unspectacular enough to never be worth fully delving.

And that had been perfectly acceptable for a very long time, so long as it had never conceptualized the issue in that way. But now its desire to strive for more was put at ends with its survival. Not in any certain way; that would have made things easier. But who knew the consequences of their actions? Any change in how it presented itself could ripple out to infinity in manifold ways.

All it could do, in the end, was do what it could. Certainly having more oversouled goblins would help it mechanically; it would be foolish to spite itself by not spawning more — which it had always planned to do, once it could figure out how to apportion the soul reasonably. That they would also, over time, help resolve its soul scarcity was an added bonus. It was just that the whole situation rubbed it the wrong way.

With a mental push, it despawned another host of high-tier creatures — ogres, cyclopi, another few blood orcs — from its lower floors, and replaced them with yet more tier 1, level 1 mana goblins on floor 51. A full dozen: six spawned in a clump around the passed-out body of its reincarnation test, six others scattered randomly through the sprawling cavern complex. It varied its reincarnation parameters again, only giving each goblin a single inherited skill: [Blood Rage] for one, from the blood orc; [Fatal Gouge] from the cyclops; one got [Tackle], a standard goblin skill but preserved from a prior life at level 12; one had a [Hobgoblin Shaman] fairly early back in its lives, and so Goblin Cave gave it its [Mana Expertise] skill. And so on, for each of the dozen. The most amusing was one that had once been a fungi — Goblin Cave pulled up its [Mycelium Supercharge] ability and passed that on.

Six goblins spawning all together next to the body of another goblin might have been a bit much. They were disoriented in the moment of their spawn, dazed and confused, and the sight of one of them unconscious and potentially dying gave their confusion and edge. That group descended into a brawl, goblins smacking each other and snarling in fear, each one thinking it was under attack and lashing out at the others.

Goblin Cave let the melee resolve itself: a second goblin knocked out of the fight, curled up in a ball on the rocky floor, body smeared with pale blue glowing blood. The rest of them resolved the situation, with one goblin — the one with [Tackle], which had apparently helped in the melee — claiming what appeared to be a leadership role: it squabbled angrily at the others, pointing and demanding they go with it. That was what Goblin Cave drew from the exchange; it was unclear if the other goblins understood it beyond that it was angry and pointing.

Still, that group of goblins hauled up their wounded, including the reincarnation test, and meandered in a bruised and bloody formation after the victor of the fight.

Goblin Cave checked their status screens: they'd all gotten experience for the scrap, with the exception of the one who'd gotten knocked down the earliest. Only a pittance of points, ones and twos and threes, with the 'leader' goblin having a whole five experience. But another point of interest: its own dungeon creatures had never before gained experience off of their own fights, only from fighting adventurers.

Instrumentally, it didn't really matter exactly what the goblins did. So long as they all remained conscious and alive, their souls would continue to seep excess, and when they eventually died Goblin Cave could recoup that into more spawns. It was difficult to not be a little invested in seeing them survive, though: the first non-hostile, self-directed life of any complexity it had in its dungeon. When it had built the hobgoblin village, it had wanted a village, and the disappointment at the end had been bitter.

Goblin Cave remained watchful as the goblins meandered around.

The connection from floor 50 to floor 51 took the form of a jagged crack in the cavern wall: a twisting chasm from behind the fungal grove that it had planned to eventually host its floor 50 boss, that formed a tight, clastrophobic spiral of bare rock, eventually opening up into the barren expanse of floor 51. Its first two goblins found the way up, cautiously clambering up the spiral passage. They moved more and more slowly as they reached the top, as dim ashmoss thickened underfoot. One of them scored up a hand-sized chunk of it and put it in its mouth, sputtering and gagging after it chewed down once.

Goblin Cave had always found the process of eating sordid and revolting. It was biological necessity, certainly, but...

In any case, most of its oversouled goblins managed to make their way up into the vast, fungi-lit expanse of floor 50. The seven goblins ran into two of its other spawns and absorbed them into their group, while another goblin saw them from a distance and then went out of its way to avoid them. Goblin Cave got to see the emergence of basic signals: one low hoot for 'left', two shorter, sharper hoots for 'right', a kind of growl for 'light', and so on. Not a language, or at least, not so long as it was only useful for two-word phrases mostly about directions and danger.

What was more interesting was one of its solitary goblins. It had been spawned in a place where the sluggish cavern currents took it to the entrance to its faux-dungeon of mana puppets. The goblin stared at the glowing entryway in the wall, casting pale blue light out across the dark granite. Slowly, over minutes, it crept closer, until it peeked its head into the introductory hallway. Seeing no movement, it made its way down the glowing corridor until it opened out into the first room. A single mana puppet hung there, motionless. The goblin jolted in surprise when it spotted it — the glowing seams that made up its body were the exact same hue as the manastone walls, and so unmoving it blended into the faint veins running through the material behind it.

Goblin Cave had an inkling. If its goblins gained experience from fighting each other then what was to stop its goblins from gaining experience from fighting a mana puppet? The mana puppet was motionless since Goblin Cave had never commanded it to do anything, save from attack adventurers. But now, it restructured its orders: attack anything that wasn't another mana puppet, even if it was an allied dungeon creature.

The mana puppet articulated to life, gliding smoothly towards the goblin, who shrieked and swung at it before leaping back. Then — the goblin's palm glowed and it shoved it forwards, howling, as it erupted with a weak [Mana Blast], tossing the mana puppet backwards. Seeing the attack impact the puppet rallied the goblin, and it followed it up with a lunging charge. Its own mana-empowered body impacted the mana construct solidly, and it smashed the construct against the wall with the same amount of force as any physically-bodied being. The mana puppet erupted in bursts of crackling light as its framework shattered, and its soul burst from its body, becoming caught in Goblin Cave's respawn cycle and sluggishly winding its way towards a vacant respawn slot elsewhere. Left behind in its wake were the haphazard remains of its forcefull despawning: its mob drops. In this case, just a sliver of manarock: as long as a goblin's finger and twice as wide, with its surface organicly pitted. A [Flawed Manastone].

The goblin, meanwhile, gained a whopping six experience. If [Lesser Mana Puppets] were indeed weak enough to be defeated in a few blows from an unarmed goblin — Goblin Cave should maybe upgrade them all to [Common Mana Puppets] before it placed them anywhere an adventurer could reach. But—

The thought was very amusing to it: but, it was a suitable challenge for goblins. A false dungeon within its dungeon, serving host to constructs for its own creatures to grind for experience. A delve within a delve. With a flight of whimsy, Goblin Cave dug out a faux 'core chamber' behind its [Common Mana Puppet] boss, and placed a sliver of manacrystal floating in the center. A false core for a false dungeon.

The goblin, meanwhile, had taken the manastone chunk and prowled deeper. But delving was not on its mind for the moment: it saw the next room, with its two mana puppets, and it turned tail and fled. No food in a manastone dungeon, after all.

Goblin Cave was tempted to spin out a second floor for its manastone dungeon. Sub-dungeon. Floor 51a. It was as good a joke as it'd ever seen. A goblin training dungeon, for its goblins.