IWUAaDNW: Discovery 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, Exploration 2.2, Growth 3.6, Exploit 4.11

It took me a second to rush through the hallway into the harsh glare of the sun, and I got my first look at the lands outside.

The first thing that struck me was the cracked arid ground, covered with dead plants and a thin layer of dust. This land had been alive recently. Piles of bricks, corners and walls of long-abandoned houses, sparsely littered the area. A village, or the outskirts of one. A farm, probably, and not a modern one. There wasn't a sign of life anywhere, except for a small path of packed earth that snaked carelessly past my tomb(?) about a hundred yards away. There was almost no wind, and what breeze blew by carried with it clouds of sand and dust that went right through me.

The hole I'd just left was exactly that; an unmarked hole into the ground without a notable feature marking it.

—IWUAaDNW: Discovery 1.1



Unseen by the Dungeon Core that knew itself as Taylor Hebert, a small spot of green appeared a few yards away from her entrance; a small stem with a pair of leaves popped out from the cracks of the dried, dead ground, defiantly staring at the stars.

More would follow.

—IWUAaDNW: Discovery 1.2



I turned around to get back inside… and froze.

“…well, that’s… interesting.”

The ground had been cracked and broken, drier than Defiant’s sense of humor. What plants had grown on it had been dead and brown. Even the ant colony that grew close to the entrance of my entrance had been a sickly, weak thing with a handful of workers trying to feed their struggling queen.

What I had in front of me, behind the entrance and over where the bulk of my dungeon was, was green. The cracks were gone, the ground was visibly browner, and a thin carpet of green leaves was starting to sprout from that dirt. I flew closer to the ground, bemoaning to fact that I couldn’t actually touch it, and saw this same ant colony as before, this time bustling with activity, with little workers popping out of their hole for just long enough to drop a grain of sand on the surface before diving back down.

This… was I doing that?

—IWUAaDNW: : Discovery 1.3



The grass patch had… grown. A lot. It was almost a hundred yards across now, a gigantic green blot in the middle of the desert. The grass was vibrant green and healthy even under the harsh sun. Near the center, the grass was tall enough for a small child to get lost into, and became progressively thinner and more sparse as it got closer to the edges.

And there were birds.

Lots of birds.

And not birds I’d ever seen, either. Oh, they looked normal enough on the surface, but even as I looked, a long-legged, four foot tall crane-like thing reached its head down, opened its beak and fired a spike of bone at the ground, which it then retracted along with the caterpillar it had speared.

A flock of tiny green and brown birds hopped here and there, digging into the ground. As another of those crane things came closer, the lot of them seemed to just fade out of existence. Based on the vibrations of the grass, though, they had actually gone invisible. A sparrow-looking thing was standing outside of the grass circle, taking a dust bath with its four wings flapping happily.

— IWUAaDNW: Exploration 2.2



“For the moment, we’ll assume that we’ll be staying here for the foreseeable future,” said Kamella. The discussion had continued while I’d been distracted by my thoughts. “We need to keep her hidden for as long as possible. For that, we need to hide the grass she creates. I suggest the construction of a wall. Ulfric, how big is the patch going to be?”

He grunted and frowned. “…I honestly have no idea. Dungeons produce pure mana just by existing. It’s what they do, and the bigger they are, the more mana they produce.”

“The patch currently extends in a circle about two hundred yards wide around the entrance,” Garlynn noted.

Ulfric nodded at her, then turned back to Kamella. “And that’s while she’s still small. She’s going to grow a lot bigger than this.”

Kamella frowned. “What if she doesn’t grow? If she stays at this size and we wait until the grass stabilizes, then build a wall around her, we could probably make it look like we’ve found a patch of pure mana and built a stronghold around it.”

I shook my ant’s head at the same time as Tyr said, “That won’t work, Kamella. Even if we somehow managed to hide the grass patch, at some point the wrong set of ears are going to catch wind of what’s going on here. Pure mana doesn’t just pop out of nowhere. Questions will be raised.”

“If she doesn’t grow more than this, we won’t be able to get anything out of her,” Ulfric added. “She’s got a single low-stress chest, and won’t let us farm her minions. That’s twelve weak items a day at most. We’ll use her mana to grow crops and raise beasts and that’s fine to avoid starvation, but the village will eat through the resources she provides like a pack of dire boars.”

[...]

“We’ll assume it can’t be done for now,” Tyr declared. “It was a good idea, we just don’t know how feasible it is.” At my nod, he asked Ulfric, “Assuming she grows to a reasonable size–say, six or seven floors. How massive will her grass patch be?”

“Hard to tell,” replied Ulfric. “Most dungeons aren’t in wastelands where their effects are so obvious. I’d say… maybe a mile? Probably.”

Tyr winced. “That’s… a bit much. I was thinking about Kamella’s suggestion, with the wall, but…”

“Then let’s think about it differently,” said Kamella. “Our friend has only one floor, for now. Her area isn’t going to be that large for some time yet. We can build a smaller set of fortification for the moment–which will also resolve our immediate wild monster problem–and build more fortifications further away later, when we are all stronger than now. As for raw materials, hm… We could use kilns to make mud bricks. We can use dried bugs for fuel; we can’t only rely on life crystals.”

— IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.6



“Ah… yes,” Tyr cleared his throat. “Construction is going well. The wall is three-quarters finished; Hrog insists that finishing it shouldn’t take much more than a week or so, but we’ve got a pretty big problem. Namely, it won’t be large enough.”

What?

“What?”

I wasn’t sure who was the one who said it, but it didn’t matter. The feeling was shared.

“When we estimated the wall’s size, we measured how quick the grass was growing,” he said, glancing at my word wall. “Unfortunately, the grass has started growing much faster in the last week or so, and we’ve already got bits of grass growing on some of the oldest bits of the wall––and on the guild house.”

In the last week? Meaning, since I started building all these rooms so I could have the mana to get the upgrades I needed.

Had I accidentally fucked us over?

“I’ve noticed that, it’s rather pretty, I would say,” Kamella quipped, though her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. Seeing her joke fall flat, she sighed. “That’s… unfortunate. Then, what can be done? Our first priority is, of course, to keep Taylor’s existence a secret. It won’t work if the wall itself is full of grass.”

“The only solution I can think of is expediting the growth of the forest and accelerating the false life spring plan,” Tyr replied glumly.

[...]

The grass immediately around the village had been trampled to dirt at this point, and the circle immediately surrounding me had started growing again except around the word wall and a dirt path that went from the village to me. Where nobody went and I had no control, the grass had grown to be nearly three feet tall in places, and in those tall grasses all kinds of animals lived. I could have the villagers hunt those to feed me progression, but somehow I didn’t think I’d be able to stop an army or an Ulfric by attacking them with a thousand horned rabbits.

— IWUAaDNW: Exploit 4.11