Dragonheart Core

Chapter 36: From the Ground Up

The sad little moss seemed to find a way to deflate even more as I pressed my power on it. Slivers of limestone crushing its outer fronds, water drained away and the barest form of pressing heat I could muster drying it out even further, pure stone and no nutrient-filled soil around—and the damn things were only just starting to die.

Moss was needed for the environment, but gods if it didn't still act like a weed.

But now the two distinct species were finally starting to brown, their greenery shriveling and collapsing to little rotten heaps of stubbornness.

Forget what other attributes they had. If they could teach my other creatures how to survive that long in an environment that could not have wished them more dead if the gods themselves willed it, my dungeon would never die.

But now I could consume.

Jadestone Moss (Rare)

In parallel to its amber-producing brethren of trees, this species stores water inside its outermost leaves until they eventually die, in which they solidify into a hard, gemstone-like mineral that defends the inner core.

Razorleaf Lichen (Uncommon)

It lives in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. Underneath its medulla, its lower cortex is a brittle, bone-like substance exposed after its section of plant dies, lining its edges in a sharp, unforgiving weapon.

Huh.

Did the billowing moss have anything to do with dying as a defense? Twice seemed too convenient.

I could see the symbiosis, though—the billowing moss over top, providing the helpful disguise as nothing more than a gentle flowing field of moss. Then, whenever something scrambled overtop to try and attack or even just walk right by as the turtle's disguise defense, problems would arise.

Only bad luck that Rihsu, a rather scaled being, had been the one to clamber over first. Others wouldn't be so lucky.

But I was certainly pleased with my newest schemas; the lichenridge turtle—although, why was it called lichenridge? It had two mosses and only one lichen—had proven its worth time and time over. Although my greater crab was still caring for her eggs down on the third floor, soon they would hatch and the newest swarm would safely return to terrorizing the Drowned Forest where they would encounter all sorts of delicious new prey and rivals alike. How the world worked best and all.

I bunched up a few pockets of mana over the backs of the four turtles dozing about in my canals, weaving together partial sections of the moss and lichen; not enough to actually drop fully-formed plants on their back, but some sort of halfway stage. The spores needed to root past their shells into a symbiotic relationship in order to thrive. Already the billowing moss spores were starting to grow, little green leaves trailing off the edges of the emerald scales. Within a week or so I imagined they'd be fully covered.

Precisely what I wanted.

The mana condensed, trembling, as I picked and prodded my way through its internal code to try and sift out what I needed; half a frond emerged, paused, and promptly dissolved again. Another twist of what could have been the brittle cortex of the lichen, roots grasping at air and disappearing; then I managed to stumble face-first into whatever part of the schema was needed and a cloud of spores drifted peacefully towards their backs.

The turtles, as little as they were moving, hardly noticed. I imagined it would take a week before they would finish their blink and finally notice that they had a whole ecosystem growing on their back.

If I had thought my cave bear had been lazy, I truly hadn't met these turtles. Maybe that had something to do with how they were formed? I tugged up my mana in a rough approximation of a frown, peering closer at the turtles. Their predecessor had still certainly acted in line with the turtle line, spending most of its time lazing about, but it had still hunted down prey and moved dens as it searched for easier food access.

Well. If my current ones didn't, would that be a problem? I wanted them to be a hidden stepping stone to rip the legs off of any invaders, but that would be reducing them to nothing more than a feature of the caverns. I wanted my creatures to thrive.

I still wanted them as traps, but not at the cost of their own lives. Some medium ground to be found, because damn they were still really good at being traps.

I poked my way around the canals, dipping through the water and up along the sides; where I'd originally pulled up the four spots, they were at the perfect locations to trick invaders to hop across them to the other side. But would that be suspicious? If there were perfect stepping stones in a dungeon that was trying to kill invaders?

If I was an invader, I'd certainly not want to jump on those.

So I started tugging up more pillars for the turtles to rest on, some huddled close to the canal walls and some much too far away to properly jump to; little dens carved into the sides in preparation for eggs, hide-a-way spots for those recovering from injuries. Something for them all to survive alongside.

Hopefully that would help.

And, well, once my current four turtles found time in their busy, busy schedules to get around to increasing their population, they would need perches as well.

Metaphorical fingers crossed and all that. I had hope.

I pulled away from my focus there, popping back down to the fourth floor to check on my algae—in the three or four days since I'd initially planted it, it had remarkably proven why it was dangerous to have only one category of an ecosystem filled; with nothing to prune it back with disease or feedings, it had so rapidly overgrown throughout the tunnels that what had once been an almost ten foot diameter was now a rather oblong, squished four.

The evolution was coming, though. I could feel it.

The algae twisted and writhed like a spectral form, with the same care and intention as the cloudskipper wisp's wild, inane movements; but there was movement. Something I could manifest from my knowledge of Rhoborh's blessing that I was infecting all my other floors with; it wouldn't come naturally and it wouldn't bind my whole floor together in such a masterful display as my Drowned Forest, but I'd be damned if I wouldn't at least take some advice from that blessing.

…I hoped the god didn't mind. That did feel uncomfortably close to smiting territory.

But alas, still no glorious notification crossing my awareness; another day, perhaps. I made to rise up to my third floor, to see how the greater crab's eggs were doing and whether the silver krait had won his battle against the much larger armourback sturgeon when something tugged at my mana.

Not a large tug, mind. But plenty enough I was able to notice it.

I shot up to my first floor.

One poor burrowing rat froze halfway through adjusting her pile of gems as she felt the full force of my awareness fall on her back.

No invaders, at least. Phew.

…It was a rather impressive pile of gems.

She was a larger rat, near two feet long with lanky limbs and a twitching tail, and it looked to have been purely fed by her jewels; she was tucked in the far back of a den huddled at the base of a stalagmite, narrow enough she had to wriggle her way past a great lump of whitecaps to make her way inside. A fantastic disguise, though—no other rats had any reason to suspect that such a rich rat would choose such a miserable home.

And rich rat she was.

No diamonds, because even the burrowing rats hadn't quite figured out how to reach the diamond-studded stalactite on the ceiling, but every other gem under the sun; sapphire and citrine and garnet and tourmaline and jet, all huddled together. And turns out that was a rather large advantage I hadn't thought of.

Jewels were, of course, something like sponges for mana; their crystalline nature meant they could contain intangible things by having them move alongside the fractals of their shape, keeping the mana moving constantly as to not fizzle out by leaking or corrupt itself by staying still. Similar to sentient things' mana channels, really. So they were perfect in a dungeon, because they could absorb from my ambient mana and constantly build up their storage until they were little stars full of power.

And, as it turns out, they were capable of bouncing mana between them.

So for every gem the rat brought back and shoved into the pile, they were sparking mana constantly throughout the stack until every one of them was glowing.

And she was, in return, fairly stuffed with mana. Beautifully close to evolution, really. Something I could very much get behind.

She was far from the only one, too.

Apparently I'd blinked and been distracted; a whole damn society was building on the first floor, shaped by rats who had no time to be worried about hungry cave bears or lurking constrictors because gems were out there. Precocious little bastards.

I had underestimated just how precocious, though.

Rats, unsurprisingly, had large families; and while not to the point of Leóro's fanatic die-for-my-family's-honour type loyalty, it did make it easier to build groups. So now there were whole hoards of them who were living in the same dens, gathering gems together, and generally fighting for their life against their own species instead of their predators. Fascinating stuff.

What was even more interesting to me was that they weren't the same—like before, some rats had figured out that they could just steal jewels instead of trying to gather them from the various places I'd hidden them all around the floor, but now they had made it an art form. Some would even willingly scamper across the field, stirring up a predator or two to scare away whatever guard was at the front of a den, just so the other rats of their family could sneak in and steal a prize. Some, maybe even most, died in the process.

Then the next day they did it again.

More guards came to be, not the guards of the old days where they would huddle by the entrance with their twin-forked tails twitching furiously as they tried to spot a predator to warn those inside; no, these were those that actively plopped their fuzzy behinds right at the entrance and fought other rats who approached, using their gnashing teeth and claws to keep them back.

Then the adventurers, those who sought out the gems, would come back late after a long shift out. Those often had the most scars, whether close saves with a predator or wounds from trying to burrow through unforgiving stone to search for gems. They were always welcomed back into the den with food and care and comfort in much the same way I imagined Gold or Mythril adventurers were welcomed into taverns.

I sat there, in not quite surprise but moreso disbelief, as a little society sprung up around me on the floor I'd callously written off as going to need to be adjusted later down the line. Any invaders looking to come through with anything even remotely mana-touched on their presence would have hell to pay.

And that was before the evolution I could feel was coming.

…maybe it was time I started putting jewels on the other floors.

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