Dragonheart Core

Chapter 34: Tree Roots

It was simple, really. Find a spot, choose an angle, dig a tunnel. Continue ad infinitum until I had a tangled mess of turnbacks and roundabouts and convergences and dead ends. A right proper labyrinth, buried deep below the mountains, containing what I hoped would soon be traps beyond compare.

It was also mindnumbingly boring.

No time to put up algae-lights, or do my best mimicry of those quartz-lights I'd absorbed off of Nil's body, so I was just tunneling through the endless black as my mental map of the space expanded. I ran into a few new materials as I had on previous floors, strands of calcite or iron or quartz, but nothing that was as good as building as my limestone. So I absorbed the stone for flecks of mana, replaced it with limestone, and kept digging. And digging.

You can probably guess what I kept doing.

My fault, though. I didn't want another straightforward room, where anyone with half a brain could trip and fall onto the exit, but even this was pushing my patience with the amount of identical tunnels. A truly fantastic turn of events only made worse by the fact I was the sorry bastard who had to dig it all out.

It would be beautiful, though. Already I could see the endless expanse, nothing but more tunnels in every direction, culminating in a wide cavern for my final predator to rest within. Something stealthy, built for stalking prey through the tunnels, but suitably large enough to try and chase them back into the tunnels for a pleasingly messy death. Best of both worlds, really. No schema like that yet under my belt, considering Seros wasn't exactly stealthy, but I'd make it work.

Although, in terms of new schemas, I couldn't help but find myself rather disappointed.

I'd shaken it off when I was digging the Underlake, too excited with the prospect of water and able to ration out that maybe there was good spacing between them, but to be two floors deep and not having gotten another fossil since the vampiric mangroves was itching at me. I wanted more extinct species—or at least new ones. It wasn't fair that I got such a new and shiny title of Resurrector and I didn't even get a chance to use the bloody thing.

No, the fossilized kelp with the merrow Priestess didn't count. I knew that thing already existed out in the world; I wanted something new. Something unique to my halls.

And to find nothing? Well. Disappointing.

It didn't even make sense; limestone was famous for being mostly made with fossils. The vast majority was far too small for me to ever be able to recreate a creature from the minute specks I found within the stone, but to not find anything for two whole floors now… unprecedented, to say the least.

Infuriating, to say more.

Nothing I could really do about it, though. Maybe I was digging too shallowly? The Underlake had to stay relatively close underneath the Drowned Forest so I could still make an exit that wouldn't flood all the floors beneath it, and I don't know, something in me had kept my focus pretty close when I was digging out this floor. I casually started to bore my current tunnel on a downward slope. Maybe the fossils were deeper?

Gods. Irritating. I wish someone would just tell me.

Rhoborh, if you wanted any more cool floors to swear to, I'd give you a great discount if you could lead me to wherever the shiny fossils were.

No response. Couldn't blame me for trying.

With a sigh, I got back to digging.

-

Three miserable days later, I had gripped and bitched and moaned my way through an entire sprawling network of interconnected tunnels.

It was a work of sublime genius, really. I'd taken my original inspiration from the roots of my mangroves and their ever forking patterns, but I'd reworked it so that while they did split up and branch off, they also reconnected, serving so that there would never truly be one correct path. They joined together in little pockets, almost like oases, so that invaders wouldn't know which fork was the original one they had been following; and with the identical, ten foot diameter tunnels I'd carved out with slavish care, they couldn't point out any markers. Thousands upon thousands of feet of labyrinth, ready to hopelessly confuse and entangle any foolish enough to enter their depths.

Yeah. I'd like to see the merrow get through this.

But it was hopelessly dark as well, and as much as I liked the idea of invaders fumbling their way through pitch blackness, my creatures wouldn't fare much better in those conditions. So it was time for algae.

But not the constant, ever-present glow of the second and third floor, where I'd wrangled my original green algae into one with buds of bioluminescence, casting a hazy green glow to help aid my plants growth. The algae and moss I wanted to grow here needed only minimal light, and I wasn't about to give my invaders any advantages I didn't have to.

Thankfully, as with all my schemas, there was an amount I could manipulate their base form before they just started to absorb my mana. And it certainly didn't take a surplus of mana to manipulate algae.

I ignored buds and stems and instead went for their spores.

Green algae, like all others, reproduced with spores—little cells they released to flit around and try to find a suitable environment to develop into a fully-fledged plant. Simple enough. This one had microscopic specks that drifted until they could plant themselves into a stone wall and start to grow.

But what if they were less simple?

I ballooned out their size, growing from tiny to still tiny but at least somewhat noticeable, and then I pulled up all of my knowledge from the luminous constrictors and made them glow.

Took a few attempts, more than I cared to admit, but soon a little patch of algae across the first tunnel shuddered and released a wave of spores. They all glowed with a pale, dim little light, barely visible except for their sheer number, drifting softly around the tunnel; and whenever they landed and went out as they started to develop up to real plants, more spores were released to take their place.

The end result was something barely visible, a pale glow only highlighting the edges of the tunnel and the flicker of water beading on the surface, and perfectly hid anything else.

I resisted the urge to cackle. Oh, I'd love to see an invader get past this.

Approximately no time was wasted in spreading the new spore-glow green algae around my tunnels—or, when I said no time was wasted, I should have clarified that a lot of fucking time was spent sitting around and doing jackshit because of how much mana it took to create this new variant. Surprise surprise, making plants give off light instead of absorbing it took a lot of work. Who would have guessed?

But before another three days could pass, I created the last batch of algae in the tunnel I intended to be the way out and promptly sagged back in relief. Gods, that took forever.

I was still left with the question of the ending room. What would eventually be the passage down to my next floor, I knew, but I didn't want it to be like all my previous floors; not just a find-the-last-room-and-go-down type deal, but something to actually challenge them.

And, well. I had had enough of cramped tunnels.

I still made it nondescript from the opening, of course. The last passage I'd constructed, sloping gently downward with numerous other passages branching off, eventually ending in a long, drawn out tunnel perfect for something to be chased and trip over my many algae roots. And after that tunnel, on an upward slope to hide its scale, was a cavern.

A true cavern, one of those enormous, endlessly sprawling ones, even though in comparison it was a little less than the size of my first floor. Jagged ceilings cushioned by the true glowing algae variant from the second floor, billowing moss that grew taller and even more billow-y like actual clouds layering over the ground. Glittering puddles lined with gold and emeralds studded the ground, mushrooms flashing iridescent whites in hidden corners. A little paradise.

Where something large and unforgiving would live.

I hadn't decided what yet, because I didn't necessarily have anything that translated well to the apex predator of this floor—again, really something I should have thought of before jumping in, but damnit if it still wasn't a better idea than my sky forest plan—but I knew the rough basics. Large but subtle, staying hidden in the algae filling the tunnels, a proper ambush predator.

And thankfully, my creatures and I were very fond of ambushes. Most of their evolutions leaned in that direction.

Not anything of the toads, if only because chasing things in the tunnels required speed; maybe an evolution of the rats, those protected by the ironback toad or those who had grown bold and daring with their stolen jewels? Perhaps a spider, one scuttling without worry through the underbrush just to strike from above. The jeweled jumper in particular would love this floor.

Ah well. Thoughts for when my creatures started to explore their way down to this floor.

As I was about to do.

Seros was gentle as ever, but gods if I didn't want to claw his eyes out for listening to my instructions and moving my core down to the fourth floor. Everything shuddered and twisted and ached—I wanted to hurl, which, as you can probably guess, is difficult as a rock. I managed as best I could with a blast of mana.

And almost immediately felt the difference.

As my core moved down a floor, the ambient mana dramatically decreased on those upper and skyrocketed on the one I was on. It was what called my creatures further down, seeking to grow stronger to have just a taste of the purest raw mana; also what called wild beings and invaders to seek my depths. A system that had led to my current growth.

But even I hadn't felt what I felt from the algae now.

It shuddered in the presence of such increased mana, twisting and writhing as emerald green stems grew triple and new glowing spores filled the air; whole tunnels seemed to shrink as the algae lining its walls swelled in size, spilling over and trailing down like the jellyfish's tendrils.

Woah.

The cavern where my core now sat was the most affected, green algae blooming up like great hanging stalactites of their own—it trembled in the way I was only used to my vampiric mangroves doing, moving in an almost deliberate shift.

Like they had awareness.

It took me a second but I found something to connect it to—in all my previous floors, most of my ambient mana went to creatures; not by anything of my choosing, but more that they were able to go out and actively absorb it, using their own abilities and mana to then suction in more of the stuff in the air. Shit luck to plants but the only way they could do that was to grow in size or manage to kill something; so while the mangroves and the lacecaps were well on their way to advancing, the others just had to sit there and hope a dead body full of mana would start to decompose on them.

Or, perhaps, if they were the only living inhabitants of the deepest floor in my dungeon.

And, as I watched the algae twist and grow as more mana filtered out through my Otherworld connection, maybe I was okay with that. If not okay, then at least interested—my only other plant evolution had come from my own meddling. What would a natural look like?

I was fine with waiting a day before bringing any creatures down just to see that.