Dragonheart Core-Chapter 184: Ocean Wanted

If my Heartwood was halfway completed, then my ninth floor would be even less so—but I just wanted my core to be lower. Something to put more space between me and invaders; and if the worst truly came to it, I would just call Seros and my other Named down to defend me, trying to cut out what scraps made it past the previous eight. I was going to survive this threat no matter what happened, this I knew.

And thus my ninth floor had to come together.

In a reverse of what normally happened, I was building this floor off of my creatures, rather than trying to gather them to fit an idea I already had. Gonçal had given me three schemas that didn't fit anywhere else in my dungeon, and I wanted to use them here—even if a part of me hissed at using it. He would know exactly what species they were, perhaps even their weaknesses or how to defeat them. But I just had to hope it was only him and not the entirety of Calarata. I couldn't afford to just let the schemas waste away in my core, scared of the potential of someone knowing them over the potential of their strength.

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And they would be very strong. The frozen world was not one of kindness, unforgiving in all the most dangerous of ways, and that was what I wanted to take. Invaders had faced fire and forest, and now I wanted them to freeze.

In terms of the floor's structure, I had a rough idea of what I wanted, mostly born of creating a different challenge than those above. The Heartwood was a cramped land, webbed in by trees and canopies, and the Scorchplains were massive and empty. I knew the cold would be different enough, but I wanted more, wanted an element to pin people as they struggled forward. No one could be allowed to make it.

As a sea-drake, I had not been a creature of the cold. When I ventured into the deep oceans, I had touched it, letting it wash over my scales, but not settled my hoard there. I preferred the warmer waters that carried more prey.

But I was very aware of the dangers of it. And those were what I wanted to harness, because there was little that guaranteed death but a glacier.

In many ways, they were the threat of the high seas, not creatures or wandering heroes. They were enormous, unstoppable, and moved faster than expected when pushed by dancing currents; I had seen corpses crushed between two opposing glaciers, entire islands battered beneath their bulk, frozen schools of baitfish dead before they could swim away.

And now they would be mine. Already I could envision it—an endless expanse of pure white, ice cracking underfoot with every step, fire or heat magic a promise of plummeting below. To create a plain of ice, some parts frozen over frigid waters and others rising in icy pillars, creating an unstable surface similar to the Scorchplains, just reversed. I wanted to see people fall through the ice into water, drowning against the frozen surface—or creating a coastline of fractured glaciers, constantly moving and shifting until no step was safe.

I wanted a lot of things. I had approximately forty points of mana to make it happen.

There would be a few corners cut for the current plan.

If nothing else, making eight previous floors had made me quite the master of burrowing into the mountain for the least amount of mana possible. I knew how to consume the stone I was destroying instead of merely erasing it, granting me fractions back, not enough to equal but enough to soften the blow.

So I gathered my mana and began to dig.

I shredded and reworked in equal measure, using scant percentages of a point to carve out yawning caverns. My plan was to make it as large as I could right now, putting all the more space between my core and invaders, and considering my Heartwood was only three thousand feet in diameter, I wanted to double the length for this one. Glaciers were tall, yes, but I wanted the danger to be from falling into the water, not necessarily climbing. So it would be around three hundred feet in height, with around a hundred of that taken up by water. A much changed environment as to the floor above.

There was so much I wanted to do. But for now, all I could try was to build up enough of a hazard so as to survive the upcoming threats, and then improve it later.

The ninth floor slowly started to come together with a yawning vastness. My prediction had been accurate—some six thousand feet long, roughly oblong with cragged corners and irregular widths. I had put in work to make sure the roof sloped and curved, not with stalactites but just tossing edges like storm clouds overhead. I didn't want anything too sharp to block the glaciers.

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As for the ground, it was a mix of nothing and pillars, reaching up to one hundred feet where the tunnel entrance was. While I was planning to flood the entire place and then freeze the top layer to provide a surface to walk on, I wanted my creatures to actually have a place to den down and rest without fear of falling through, so I raised some two dozen pillars throughout the floor to build a proper basis on.

I had made that mistake before with the Scorchplains, where even the blazebane wolves needed to retreat all the way to the walls to reach their den. I wanted the creatures here better spread out and ready to react to any invaders, not spending their time tramping from side to side. Particularly if there would be enormous glaciers trudging around and making it take even longer.

The Jungle Labyrinth was a nightmare before, and now it was moreso due to Nenaigch's boon to make the tunnels move. I could make a mimicry of that with glaciers, by setting all of their bases in the water and kicking up currents to push them. It would take some work, but I could picture it now, all the madness of icy walls thundering by with no way through. All I had to do was make it.

And for that, I needed an ocean to build them off.

I reached downward, digging into the stone beneath the exit to carve out a pocket. There, I gathered over twenty points of mana—almost all of what I had remaining, which hurt—and dumped it into a colossal gem of murky blue-white.

The jewel hummed with power, filled near to the bursting mere moments after its creation—the excess mana shivered within, nowhere to go but needing to move, attuning to the gem that held it.

And then, slowly, water began to trickle out.

I was very thankful I'd discovered this little trick a while back, after the debacle with the saltwater poisoning my mangroves. If I had to rely on the cove and the mountain river for all my water, I'd be stuck with deserts for floors, much less the aquatic paradises I wanted. Particularly for something as large as this, stretching to the far reaches and with a dream of reaching over a hundred feet of water. And ice.

It would take time for this to work, needing to fill in the floor, but I had deliberately created the gem to be impure—both water and ice attuned, taken from someone during the last big invasion. So the water that was being created was frigid, pulsating on the edge of frozen, just enough to keep flowing without even providing a break. And once it was high enough, I would stop feeding the gem mana, and create a new one of pure ice, which would freeze the upper crust of the semi-ocean. Probably. 𝘳𝓪ΝőВÊŞ

I was experimenting here, just a little bit. Given I was in a tropical cove that had a jungle less than a hatchling's swim away from my first entrance, I hadn't exactly done much with ice since becoming a dungeon, but I was relatively confident that this would work. By actively powering the gems, the mana that left them would be attuned to whatever they were, which should create water and then ice. And then perfection.

An enormous tundra, crowned with glaciers that went from surface to ceiling with no way to avoid, waters rushing underneath and ready to carry away any invaders. Perhaps I could even obtain schemas of creatures that lived under ice, slamming into it from underneath to trick invaders into their mouth. All while muskox herds headed over the planes and snowscape beavers built icy dens. Piercing lynxes would stalk from the blustering snow, bounding moose lumbering through, lunar cave bears hunkering within glacial homes. The basis of this ecosystem would have to be fish, considering I wasn't providing anywhere for plants to grow—but I trusted in my ambient mana to forcibly evolve baitfish that filled this sea until they survived. Once I moved my core down here, there would be so much mana that I knew ice-attuned evolutions would pour forth, providing food for all those I wanted to add.

Even if I couldn't do anything now. As much as I wanted slowly-moving glaciers, grinding away over the stone with the rumble of ancient tectonics, it had taken all of my mana just to shape the floor itself. I would have to wait.

My points of awareness came back together, time beginning to move more normally as I watched water spill into the opening I'd carved for it, lapping at the base of the pillars. How long would it take for it to fill completely? How long until I could add fish, add plants, add greater creatures to the ice above?

I looked over the floor, vestigial as it was. Unease flickered through my core.

…should I start on my tenth floor? Should I try to go even deeper, just to put more room between my entrance and my core? It was a hazard as it was, and would only grow moreso as the water filled, but I didn't trust this to stop invaders, not if they made it down as far as they would have.

I glanced at my scant few points of mana. The Heartwood had only a few species to its name, this floor was empty, yet an instinct deeper than my comprehension called me further down. It said to keep digging. It said to burrow.

The Marquesa de Wolf. Was she enough of a threat to actually warrant this response? Why was I reacting like this? Svythe's memory was altered by her own hunger of the world she saw, viewing it as little more than prey and not-prey; I couldn't be certain of how serious Ealdhere was when he warned her. But it took a certain kind of fear for a human entirely unprepared for combat to stare at my vampiric dryad and speak to her instead of losing their mind. He felt serious, or at least scared.

There was no sound but the slow trickle of water, building up as my ambient mana fed into it. And still I felt scared.