Goblin Cave dug upward, and as it did it mused.

It had been — it still was — frustrated with the bounds of its world. How it was a collection of ephemeral lives that existed only to be killed for experience, living in mortal terror. Now, after its experimentation with its sub-core, it had some vague concept of what place it might have in the larger world, and it did not like what it saw. If the adventurers that delved it were analogues of its goblins, what did that say about the larger world? Certainly nothing good. It was all meat to be fed into the grinder: raw resources to be exploited to continue a cycle. Where in all that was the meaning? Its goblins had desires, maybe, and they were crude and childish ones. Were the adventurers all that different? Grinding their starting levels in its dungeon, before moving on to greater things — but where were those greater things? Higher-level dungeons? A ceaseless upward climb, to what? To have the largest numbers? To make oneself secure against any other with higher numbers? Surely there must be some meaning beyond that.

It would need to obtain eyes outside its dungeon. Snatches of dialog, books dropped haphazardly from corpses — it was no way to get a complete understanding of the world. How that could even be achieved, it had no idea. Early on in its existence, it had sent some goblins out of its dungeon, and the instant they had stepped over its mana threshold they had begun to unweave, dissipating apart into raw unstructured mana. Much later on it had tried with some home-grown goblins, and while those had been made of meat the end result was much the same: their souls burst from their bodies, leaving behind a rapidly-dying meat puppet. It had no reason to believe its oversouled goblins would perform differently.

It would need to find evolutions for mana goblins and mana puppets. It would need to expand its sub-dungeon loop to get both its goblins and its mana puppets leveling. It would need to construct additional control nodes for managing the splitting and combining of its oversouled creatures — call them "god", perhaps. A god of goblins that existed only to ferry souls efficiently through its respawn loop.

And it would need to dig. All its upper floors were, ultimately, dug out in a panic, as it desperately struggled to dig deeper and deeper. They followed a pattern. Lacking the spawns necessary to defend itself, its redesign would focus on disorienting: breaking the patterns it has established. It would prepare its altered floors: labyrinthine hallways of exotic materials, bizarre meldings of its old caverns, fractal webs of duplicated rooms in dizzying spirals, and once it was done, once it was ready, it would thread them into place within its existing dungeon. But first, it would need to dig and dig and dig. Sixty years had given it forty nine floors, and although its upward pace was much improved, it would still be the work of years to complete. But: looking at its upper floors, still circling with adventuring parties, it seemed like it would have the time.

Floor 48, its ogre warrens. High up on the slopes of its ravines, otherwise unaccessible, it chiseled out hallways of ink-black voidstone, leading into a geometric maze of frustum corridors with every surface made from frictionless, mirror-smooth voidstone. Suspended within were shards of manacrystal, core imitations, and floating in the void, with no frame of reference, it was impossible to distinguish distance and size. Floor 47, its cyclops encampments: monolithic stone blocks cemented within the white sands of a vast underground cavern, with lampwick fungi in wrought iron copses at the margins of the sprawling construction, demarcating the edges of the zone, with nothing but barren white sands for leagues until the sands met the walls of the cavern. Goblin Cave extruded hollow manacrystal pylons randomly amid the barren wastes, and at their cores they pierced through into an imitation of system-space: a fierce realm of burning blue light, narrow and twisted, with brilliant lines of fiery light beading between connections, always pulsing and shifting. Floor 46, its subtellurian orrery. A temple to a senseless god of meaningless machinery. That was how it envisioned it now, at least. It had dug out tunnels of oozing stone to populate with its [Leaden Cyclops], and structured them in ordered patrols. It sketched out complex symmetries of corridors outside of its former floorplan, filled with astronomical machines spinning out senseless orbits above reflecting pools of black water. To connect to the old floor, it dug hallways that slowly transitioned from rough granite blocks to smooth manastone brickwork by slowly replacing one brick in a hundred with manastone, and then a second, a third, as the hallways continued, until they were entirely manastone.

... and up and up and up.

Several things of note happened while it was digging.

More of its oversouled goblins were birthed; some died. Many didn't breed true, producing only regular [Goblins], and Goblin Cave ended up interceding to excavate a mana pump beneath the goblin's camp, bathing them and their eggs in waves of coherent mana. After that, about half of their eggs began to show the signs of developing into a [Mana Goblin]: blue-white mana glow seeping through the leathery flesh, outlining vague, half-formed fetal bodies. Complex patterns began to etch themselves across their skin. On the whole, the [Goblins] fared less well; without access to mana attacks they were unable to damage the mana puppets at all. One fashioned a crude manastone knife from a stolen shard of manastone and became fairly proficient.

The lesser mana puppets were, at first, difficult to level — none survived long enough to gain many levels — but as its subcore dug out its idiotic dungeon slowly the deeper floors became thicker with longer-lived puppets, and those managed to reap a few goblin souls and gain the investment of experience back. Goblin Cave considered the entire thing, goblins and all, as a machine for converting mana into experience: mana flowed into it, spawning low-level puppets. Goblins killed the puppets, converting the spawn cost of mana into experience. That concentrated the mana cost of dozens, hundreds of mana puppets into a single goblin. Then when a deeper puppet managed to kill a goblin — that concentrated the experience further. Condensing it all down, forming pressure into system space; that was the entire purpose of everything that lived within it. That was, perhaps, the entire purpose of the world: loops and loops, wheels within wheels, an unfolding realm of fantastical desire — all to convert a common resource into something more rarified.

Several of its mana goblins had hit level 6, and it received an unexpected notification from one of them:

New creature evolution available: [Mana Goblin] (t1, dark) → [Ascended Mana Goblin] (t6, dark) → [Infused Amalgam] (t6, light) → ??? (t?, ?)

It had... not expected that. For the most part its goblins had species evolutions every 12th tier, with only incremental variations between; who knew how 'incremental' this evolution was. Goblin Cave hesitated only fractionally before selecting [Ascended Mana Goblin]. Its primary concern was about the oversoul: if more and more soul was needed for each tier, then it was entirely possible that evolving an oversouled creature could drop it down beneath whatever threshold of autonomy. But there was no way to determine that aside from attempting it and seeing the results.

The goblin it had chosen — one of the followers-on of its first dungeon-delving goblin, who by now had formed a group bedecked in glowing gems scavenged from the sub-dungeon — staggered, stumbling. It had been walking along a path near the developing goblin village, and it tottered and fell off into the ditch to the side. Its mana warped and shuddered, unfurling from within its body to cocoon it in a glowing shroud, where it formed a shuddering, pulsating egg. The other goblins that had been with it hooted and screeched in alarm, running in all directions, and then, over the next hour, approached again, staring at the evolving cocoon. One of them poked it with a fungal branch, making the entire thing wobble. They appeared to be familiar enough with goblin eggs that they understood fundamentally what was occurring, and they mostly kept watch over the cocoon during the days-long process of evolution.

When the evolution finally completed... the cocoon grew saggy and thin over the course of hours, its membrane thinning as the goop inside finished spinning itself into a new shape, and the [Ascended Mana Goblin] burst out with a tearing of claws, heaving up amniotic slime. The goblins watching it shrieked and fled.

New creature template unlocked: [Ascended Mana Goblin]! Ascended Mana Goblin tier 6, dark A goblinoid creature. The crude grafting of a [Mana Goblin] had given way to a true synthesis of biology and thaumaturgic energies. Can cast all tier 0 unaligned spells as free actions. Can cast all tier 0–3 unaligned damage spells as free actions.

That description seemed to be editorializing a little. Crude grafting? But it was true that the [Ascended Mana Goblin] looked... distinct. The glowing blood and flesh that characterized the [Mana Goblin]s' appearance had been replaced with something almost statuesque: they were shaped in sections if their body had been divided by angled planes, cutting slices through their flesh. Ordinary flesh on one side of the plane, and on the other it was as if their body was made from clear glass or spectral foam: translucent flesh and muscle, revealing fiercely-glowing mana-infused bones. Some of the planes cut across the goblin's face, revealing one eye-socket and hollow pit of the nose. Rather than being a synthesis as the description said, it almost seemed even more unnatural... but in that, perhaps Goblin Cave was in agreement with the system for the first time in a while: if the nature of reality was the conjoined layers of physical space and system space, then anything that correctly reflected that would be a piecemeal abomination. Perhaps that was editorializing on its part.

Its soul... it was hard to say. Goblin Cave had no clue what the subjective experience of evolving was; dungeons, as untiered entities, had no equivalent. The goblin heaved, panting hard, and slowly crawled its way up to the path, skin shining with birthing slime.

Goblin Cave would have to construct its goblin-god sooner rather than later. Even if this goblin was fine — which remained to be seen — the process of soul infusion would only get more and more involved as its goblin camp became more populated. It had been reflecting on the mechanics of it as it had been digging, and the involved but also tedious nature of siphoning soul from goblin to goblin was a perfect place to add automation. Ensouling eggs was troubling enough, and those weren't moving around and developing their own souls as the rest of the goblins had been.

It spun up another control node and tethered it into the web of interconnected goblin souls, slowly working out pressure and tension so that the [Ascended Mana Goblin] pulled yet-more soul into its already (to Goblin Cave's eyes) grotesquely oversized and bloated soul, while still managing to siphon some smaller percentage off to the goblin eggs. The control node would need continual tweaking until it determined the optimum level of soul for each creature, and currently Goblin Cave had no way to measure that.

The other goblins approached the [Ascended Mana Goblin] — the one with the fungus-branch stick poked at the goblin again — and chittered amongst themselves. Their language still hadn't evolved much, but there were fragments. "Danger?" "Needs rest?" "Hurt?" "Dying?" "Monster?" and so on. The goblins helped the ascended one to its feet and hauled it back to their camp. The evolution process was always physically taxing, but... previously, Goblin Cave had been able to order its freshly-evolved spawns around more-or-less as usual, even only moments after evolution completed.

It was too early to say for sure, but it was going to continue with its assumption that the evolved form took vastly more soul. Normally, a step of six tiers required roughly sixteen times the soul to spawn, and if the process of oversouling a spawn wasn't linear — and it had no reason to assume it was — then it could require even more soul than that. Twice as much would be doable; another sixteenfold on top of that wouldn't. All it could do was accumulate soul over months and months and feed it into the ascended goblin and see the result. But it had months. Still, that put an even sharper limitation on its experiments with evolution. It had other goblins that were close to evolving, now that it could see the unlocks, and it was tempting to fork off into whatever [Infused Amalgam] would be. But it simply didn't have the souls to spare. Yet.

The goblins returned the disoriented ascended goblin to camp and laid it out on a fungal bed. It would be cared for well enough until Goblin Cave could reinvigorate its soul, and in the mean time: It had yet-more digging to do.