I'd finished evolving my creatures, choosing my schema. Repairing my walls, healing my creatures, settling the water level. All the standard steps I always completed when I was invading, perhaps with a touch more repairing than typical, and now I should have started on figuring out what I'd make with my fourth floor.

Instead, I had settled a point of awareness over my third floor and was merely watching the empty water.

Empty, because it definitely was—only a few brave silverheads were swimming around, free to nibble at the algae without worrying about being killed by a silvertooth hungry for a meal; because there were none of them. My one surviving armourback sturgeon had fled back to the comfortable canals of the second floor, Seros had stayed curled around his evolving kobold, the greater crab was still hunting for a nest for her eggs, nursing her missing claw. They'd nearly not made it.

If I wanted them to actually survive this, I couldn't just rebuild. I'd have to remake.

Two people had escaped from my halls, making their way out into the wider world where Calarata could properly learn of my existence and come out to squash me like the bug I'd so well proven myself to be. Gods.

It'd been easy to handwave away my weaker floors, brimming with pride as I was about my mangrove canals and the underground lake; but I was a dungeon. Most races didn't see me as an oasis from the Otherworld, a saving grace to Aiqith bringing all manners of new mana in to heal the world from the scars of mages. They saw me as a battery. I didn't have the luxury of only building powerful levels when I felt like it. Invaders would murder me whether or not I took my time to make sure every plant and creature was arranged in an aesthetic pattern.

The thought was painfully harrowing. How many wake-up calls could I afford to keep waiting for? The original attack had told me to start actually acting like a dungeon, the second reminding me to dig deeper, and now this one telling me that I was a fucking idiot who had been so determined to stay alive by not defending myself. Gods.

I kept the melancholic points of awareness above the third floor, some sort of reminder, and dove to the corpses of the merrows. With their deaths and souls I had almost full mana, and I was saving dissolving their bodies until I could actually use the mana I'd gain from that. But they did have other things I could take from them.

All the merrow held various weapons, and I nipped and dug into the metal that made up their blades; most of what I already knew but with the addition of some… crystalized sand-based metals? I didn't fully understand how it was made but as I dissolved through its core, I could pick up faint memories of gathering sand from the sea floor, wrapping the particles in boiling water, and shaping the molten glass alongside a mixture of bits of iron. Impervious to rust, unable to dull, but prone to shattering. Interesting. I saved the metal for further study.

Unfortunately, no merrow wore clothing beyond sheaths, so no further schemas for me—with the notable exception of the Priestess.

She had been bound up in all manners of jewels and artifacts, ones I hadn't yet had the pleasure in obtaining; diamonds and sapphires and rubies, carved in all manner of pleasing shapes and half-bursting with mana. Used as some sort of mana battery, I could guess—I gave a mental frown and poked around some aquamarine, the pale blue of its surface flickering faintly with leftover ice. She'd used this mana for her freezing spell, and… I searched and managed to find a garnet on one of the strands Seros had ripped free across the room, also empty but with a lingering warmth. This for her fire spell.

Gems stored mana, I knew that—but could I use that? Something to keep me from worrying about invaders stealing all my ambient power whenever they used spells? And storing specific types of mana as well; a trap I could leave maybe, building patches of citrine into the wall just waiting to explode into lightning the second they were mined.

But the Priestess had another prize. Some sort of a mark of pride, easily over a dozen on her body; little strands of fossilized kelp.

This time, I wouldn't let it take three days.

I felt my Resurrector title flare to life as I reached out, digging little needles of mana into the white strands. A point, three; the fossil shivered once, twice, and unfurled back to life.

Bloodline Kelp (Uncommon)

It grows in massive forests that have no limit, with every strand connected by a greater awareness. Endlessly it grows, searching to overtake the oceans it exists in, and the forest never forgets those who attack it.