Change POV 705

I woke up today. It's a weird feeling, I feel like I have always existed but I don't remember anything in particular that is related to me, but I have some acquaintances like the language.

I feel that someone created me and is protecting me, I know that this is my creator. I bow and greet him, then I feel through my link with him that he is giving me an order. In order to prepare us to go out, I think he trusts me because he appoints me responsible. There are two more like me but out of the two there is one that seems slow and failing. I will do it to accomplish my mission. I go to the warehouse and we dress roughly, there are some enchanted weapons and I give a shield to 703 because it's the only thing he can do and I take for myself and for 704 two swords. I also collect bags, rope, boxes and all the bottles and test tubes that we find as well as a big chain.

We put all the tools in the cart and climb into them before leaving for the forest. There is no path and the slope is steep, but we reach it in the early afternoon. We immediately start the harvest, I tell 703 to take a bag and fill it with different plants. With 705 we take flasks to collect insects. There is everything, I do not know their name but some seem poisonous. When we don't find any new insects, we take boxes and catch the little animals, the creator told us to bring them back alive so we do it. Our bodies are not skilled so we take time.

Finally, when we have gathered enough, we pick up our weapons and start hunting more seriously. It took a while before we ran into a big fox, he tried to run away but I jumped on him to catch him, almost crushing him.

We can't catch any birds but we found two wolves, we put everything in the cart and it is already dark when we come back.

Suddenly on the way back, a bear surprises us, immediately we descend and 703 comes forward.

The bear is easily one meter high and two meters long, we start to fight. 703 charges him and we go around him to hit the bear on the sides. The bear kicks its paws around 703, and its strength causes it to sink into the loose earth. The shield resists because it is enchanted. We hit at that point by taking advantage of its disadvantageous position. Our weapons are also enchanted although slightly and I manage to slice along his side, 704 do the same on the other side but the bear reacts and bites him violently on the shoulder, shaking his mouth. I take the opportunity to stab him and I feel my sword sink deep into his chest. The bear lets go 704 and howls, it gets on its hind legs and crashes into 703. The enchanted shield resists but sinks into 703's unprotected flesh.

The bear is injured but still not dead 705 stabs its rear joints to immobilize it and I check the condition of 703. There is not much to check but I put the rest in the cart, we go on with it. bear and go back to the cave.

Day 56

Change POV Dungeon

I wake up from my meditation when my servants return from their hunt. I notice the death of one of them but I am not very saddened they are replaceable, however I regret the loss of a soul. I have gained quite a bit of mana, and I ask the minions to bring all their catches. I quickly control all plants and insects because they have no soul. I wonder how a soul is formed and if I could create one. After having killed and absorbed them, I acquire the knowledge of common plants and insects. I notice moss which is a basic element for the nutrition of a dungeon and poisonous insects, vines, spiders and especially several species of ants.

Ants are one of the most adaptive organisms, even more so when infused with mana. They are colonies of several million individuals and by increasing in size with magic they are terrifying, dungeons that produce ants, bees or termites are generally not appreciated by kingdoms as they produce little wealth and represent a significant danger. I would only use them on the last lines.

I then take possession of rodents and other small animals including snakes, rats, rabbits and a fox. They also don't have a soul but earns me a lot of mana. Finally there are the two wolves and the wounded bear. Both wolves seem to have materialized some semblance of a soul, I think this is the start of its training and the bear is slightly more advanced. I kill the three before absorbing them.

I think that animals at their birth do not have a soul unlike the sapience races and that the latter is formed when they grow up.

With my meditation and this harvest I have enough mana to absorb all the non magical items in the cave. I then ask my servants to assemble the rest in my current room. I then acquire knowledge of most metals, fabrics, glass, various alchemy tools as well as various furniture.

I then fill up all the rooms and dig an empty room at the entrance to the cave. At the end of a long winding corridor I add two other rooms 20 meters long by 10m wide and 3m high. The corridors are 1 meter wide, 2m high and 50 meters long. Once I do that, I am exhausted and tell my minions to protect me while I recover.

I enter into meditation, the rich mana of the dungeons attracts the animals of the surroundings who see there an opportunity to transform into a monster, it is a trap to collect more minions. I am not like all dungeons since I am an alchemical dungeon but it must be the same principle if we exclude my superior intelligence and my knowledge.

Day 59

When I wake up my mana is almost full, I think I have been meditating for several days. I have confirmation of this when I see the corpses starting to rot in the last room before my pit. There are different animals that are mainly carnivorous. By detecting my cave I noticed a large presence of insects and rodents. I kill and absorb everyone which makes my stash full. Among the new animals there is a lynx and wild dogs.

With my mana I absorb all the enchanted tools including the weapons and clothes of my servants. I recreate them pants, boots and a leather shirt with an enchanted sword and a small shield each. I then order them to bring back the cart and the two horses that I also absorb. I'm going to recreate a reinforced cart that looks like a big, metal reinforced hardwood box with a door on the back and four wheels. I set up capture equipment indoors. Recreate two modified horses, they are slower but bigger, heavier, more resistant and enduring to climb and tow the heavy cage. I also strengthen their muscles. Once done I ask them to go back to the forest and come back with the cage full of new living beings.

I have less than a third of my mana left because I had to upgrade the cart and horses. I decide to enlarge the cave system and design a rough labyrinth of 10 pieces of the same previous model connected by the same corridors. I also design many rifts and holes connecting the caves to facilitate the development and movement of my future minions.

When I'm done, I realize I'm almost out of mana and no defenders. I need to fix the problem quickly so with all I have left I summon a classic bear in my last room to defend myself. Before I plunge back into meditation, I notice that my passive regeneration has greatly improved.

Day 60

I wake up much earlier than last time with my reserves full, it seems like I have to find a way to increase them if I want to continue to grow. With this new mana, I complete my preliminary expansion plan consisting of a maze of 20 pieces plus the entrance room and the one for my core.

I look at all the plants I can use for my dungeon and the moss seems to be the most suitable for the base of the food chain. The majority of growing dungeons use this strategy, presumably to reduce monster maintenance costs by creating an ecosystem.

So I spread a piece of foam in the center of each room before injecting my mana there to help it spread everywhere. The moss grows bigger and quickly forms a green carpet on the floor and walls of the dungeon, becoming scarce towards the top. The moss seems to feed on the ambient mana without negatively affecting regeneration, on the contrary it increases it very slightly. I then spread in the different nests several families of insects with those which seem to me the most dangerous at the end. All the organisms belonging to a dungeon have a multiplied growth which allows a better evolution. I can already see that several tufts of moss have spontaneously evolved into dungeon moss and are gently replacing each other. With the exception of the smallest organisms I must create an evolutionary path for each species if I want my servants to evolve. Concretely I have to force an individual to evolve before the model is recorded, then all the individuals of the race will be able to evolve in this form when they will have reached enough power.

I will need to have some time before I do this for the insects, I want to wait for them to multiply before making them fight to select the best breeds. I am not adding for the moment any beings larger than insects. Already I see them running to feed and lay eggs before dying. The first conflicts break out. The deeper the rooms, the greater the concentration of mana, these are naturally the most popular locations.

I turn away from that to build something else. I want to design a floor, the last, to carry out all my experiments and store my treasures. I have to find a way to design a dummy kernel for the last dummy piece but I don't know how to do it yet. So I start to build my last floor.

While building the labyrinth I observed that the mana consumption increases slightly with distance, to enlarge my domain and I verify this by digging my 2 floors. I first create a hidden staircase in the bear room that descends into a circular room 10 meters in diameter. In front of the stairs a corridor leads for 50 meters to a circular room 20 meters in diameter where I place my core. In this room there are 5 doors on the back which each lead to a different room. I turned into dungeons for eternal life but also for knowledge and to perfect my experiences.

The first door leads to an alchemy room, I don't have enough mana at the moment but I plan to build the best alchemy gear perfectly suited for dungeon practice.

The second room is an enchantment room, for my research on the subject.

The third room is a biology room to experiment with evolutionary paths and new races.

The fourth door is a storage room for treasures that I would create in the future . I am stingy and I would never let adventurers take my most precious possessions. I would give them my failed experiences and my failures.

All these rooms are of the same shape for the moment, a square of 30 meters on the side.

Finally the last room is intended for the development of my race of dungeon ants. For the moment I have black ants, the bigger ones, dwarf ants, the smallest but they proliferate very quickly, the red ants, which have bites and are generally stronger, finally the red ants which are more organized and smart. There are a few other species that I am not familiar with. I wait for my minions to return to make them fight against each other and select the winners to make them the new race. It is the only room with living things.

For the moment I am preparing the room, it is the largest room to date, it is 100 meters long and 15 wide, I saved mana by only setting the height to 2 meters. I filled the cave with 1 meter of earth and pebbles, then I covered the roof and the walls with dungeon moss before sowing various plants and insects in all the cave, the moss does not need of water but the plants if then I create mini channels in the ceiling to make the drops fall. It is only vegetation of less than a meter.

The last problem concerns the light. My servants brought me fireflies. A kind of insect that produces light and I want to try to make a luminous vine out of it. But before that I prepared 10 boxes equally spaced on each side of the room (20 in all) each of 5 meters by 5 meters with 3 meters high. I filled them with 1.50 of earth and arranged in the moss and plants without insects. All its lodges are connected to the central cave but the passage is blocked for the moment.

It is the largest room in the dungeon and the mana concentration is growing rapidly.