She came over to me, shivering, and continued in a brave voice, “Well, not what we were after, but congratulations! You made your first dungeon monster! There is an… issue though. It is a natural plant that gained cultivation ranks by absorbing Essence, not a monster you actually created. Because of this, it will not obey you completely, unless it swears loyalty to you. Since it can’t make that deal, as a plant, you need to drain away its Essence.”
<But I did just make it!> I looked at the plant. It was just a plant before, now it was a monster.
“You didn’t though. Do you understand it?” She prodded knowingly. “Could you make another one with the same pattern?”
I refocused on the monster, I‘ll call it a shroomish, and tried to study it. I couldn’t, for some reason. Looking at the Essence in it I tried grab it, then to coax it away, but was met with severe resistance.
<It is not giving me the Essence.> How rude! Really, I was basically its creator.
Dani grunted, a very unladylike sound. “Oh right! As a monster it won’t just happily give you its life force. It needs to be defeated. Make a chunk of rock fall off the ceiling above it, squashing it and releasing its Essence, which will then be automatically pulled to you because it is in your influence.” She verbosely directed.
<I’ll give it a shot.> Concentrating on the roof of the cave, I carved a small rock away and let it fall. The shroomish splattered with a keening sound, and the Essence shot into me, far more Essence than I had ever taken in one go before, as I had not drained it somewhat beforehand. The Essence was entirely different than I had been expecting, a much more complex blend of earth, plant, and a cool refreshing feeling which revealed itself to be water Essence. It absorbed far easier than other Essence did, but tasted rather bland to me. After the last bit had filled me, I turned my attention to the pattern of its body.
<It is so different!> I exclaimed in surprise. <It has an entirely different pattern! How did that happen? I don’t know how to do that!> I was babbling, so I tried to stop talking.
“It is a natural evolution.” Dani informed me. When all I gave in return for this information was confusion, she decided to explain herself.
“As you get stronger, you can make creatures evolve by supplying them with the energy to do so, or they can absorb items or different elements to change themselves naturally.” Dani explained, looking at the splattered remains from a careful distance. “Usually, the Essence you supply would direct the changes, but since yours seems to be so pure, it must have allowed for it to become what it would have after decades of cultivating, or a ‘natural evolution’. You keep throwing me for a loop.”
<I haven’t touched you.> At least the cultivation stuff made sense.
“It is a figure of speech. Not a literal statement. Stay with me here, this opens up a slew of options for us that I hadn’t considered.” Dani was getting excited again. Should I be nervous? “We’ll get to that, but first try to recreate the Mob. And before you attack my verbiage, my choice of words that is, a ‘Mob’ is a short way to say ‘dungeon monster’.”
<Why not call it a ‘Dum’? For ‘dungeon monster’.> Where was she getting that abbreviation?
“It just… It just isn’t.” Dani sputtered, seemingly exasperated.
I looked at where the shroomish had originally been, and was startled to see the body was melting directly into the floor, it was mostly goo at this point. Must be an effect of my influence. I tried to pay attention to what Dani was telling me to do, so I began listening carefully. Dani explained that to create a Mob, all I had to do was make a ‘seed’ of energy infused with the pattern of the creature I wanted to make. Apparently this would even work if I wanted to make creatures that weren’t normally made from actual seeds, all the way up to the largest beasts in existence, although those big creatures would obviously take longer to mature. Or lots of Essence.
I focused and made the needed pattern on an Essence ‘seed’ and watched as it absorbed the ambient energy in the room to quickly grow to full size. I would never know the difference between the original and the current one, if it weren’t for the fact that I could feel a link to the creature in my mind. I imprinted on it that it should not attack Dani, but anything else was fair game. I could feel its assent as it ate a smaller mushroom right next to it, then moved into a near hibernating state, waiting for any inattentive prey.
Finally done with the Mob creation, I returned to infusing an area with enough Essence to quickly grow plants, and properly made the remaining regular mushrooms put spores out onto the Essence-rich stone. Following this, I resumed passively absorbing Essence and trying to increase my area of influence. After roughly ten days I was able to fill the entire cave with a light coating of Essence, and had reached the entrance of the cave.
~Three~
“Good work!” congratulated a very bored Dani. The poor girl hadn’t been able to order me around for days, I think it was wearing on her. “What you need to do now is work on concentrating the Essence as densely as possible in this room, and we will expand our work from there.”
<What about the door? Won’t it flow out?>
“If you focus hard there first, you can direct your will to cause the air to be too dense for less concentrated Essence to leak out, like a bubble.” Dani distractedly stated.
I considered this for a moment. <I like bubbles, they make my puddle dance.>
“HA! What? That took me by surprise.” She chuckled. “Try it out.”
I worked on this for a few days as the Essence in the room became denser. The mushrooms and other flora I had discovered in the room flourished. Before I knew it, the room had filled with many varieties of moss, fungus and other low level plants. Grass tickled my senses. The regular mushrooms were the same size as the shroomish, which had also multiplied as the original had put out spores. Because I had created the original shroomish I still had a connection to all of the others, known as ‘dungeon born’ creatures. The monsters were well hidden in the patches, and growing stronger by the day.
Dani explained to me that being dungeon born means that I did not directly create the creature, but it was given life through me. This gives the creature the ability to function autonomously, with the downside of not allowing me to take direct control of its mind. I can “ride along” in a Dungeon born creatures mind from any distance and experience what it does; I also may be able to influence the creature if it remains of a lower cultivation rank than myself. When I am able to create creatures that are actually intelligent, I would use them as scouts outside of my dungeon. That way they can bring back things for me to study, or attack other things away from me.
Eventually I would need to have plenty of the Dungeon born Mobs if I wanted to see beyond my boundaries. If I were to directly create every Mob, I would be able to control them much better, but the downside would be that they could not ever leave my depths without dying from lack of Essence. They simply cannot survive in the wild without my help.
“I think that the Essence has been concentrated enough for us to start to expand. We need to have you make a tunnel, which we will build another room at the end of.” Dani started babbling excitedly.
Another room to grow things in?! <Great! How do we start?>
“Build your Essence up on that wall, and convince the wall to open small holes and absorb your influence. Fill a tunnel about six feet tall by four feet wide. When you reach a point where you want to build another room, use your power to compact the stone to either side. The stone will be much stronger than the original, and will serve to guide adventurers where you want them to go. It’ll also likely glow with the accumulated Essence you put into it, which will look fairly spectacular if I say so myself.” Dani directed, stopping only because she ran out of breath. Truly impressive as she did not have lungs.