Okay so I made a few improvements here and there, first of all I made a calendar for cycles and cut out some tunnels in stone walls for my insectoid army. When I thought about making the insects I had an idea to mix arachnids and ants. So the resulting insect which I will call Zodarii from now on has eight chubby legs, long and sleek thorax, small ‘butt’ with glands that make acid resistant web and 3 eyes one in on the ‘butt’ two on sides of head.

I also enlarged the whole thing to size of my crystal and begun making the plans for my great empire. First of all I evolved more types of bacteria into shrooms and plants that filter the air. My goal was to fill up this whole place with pure oxygen, people often make the wrong assumption that breathing pure oxygen could make migraine go away. Problem is too much of it will break the internal structure of your lungs and possibly kill you in a couple of breaths.

Also I made some small napkin like animals that float around by producing hydrogen from pure mana and burning it creating water. Now that the basics of the ecosystem are in place I can start expanding. 

I began expansion by creating a specific caste among my napkins and Zodarii. Napkins will mix oxygen with hydrogen and use it as a makeshift heat gun. Zodarii on another hand with better heat resistance provided by mana and a separate mini lung that helps exchange heat, will start breaking the rock with their mandibles that were sharpened on other rocks and by my mana string.

Right now I have 2 napkins and about 10 baby Zodarii miners, so I split them into two teams. Team nr 1 with 2 napkins and 6 miners will dig the tunnel that is as big as 3 by 3 my cores next to each other. Team 2 with the rest will haul the stone into the colony that will break it into fine powder that will be used to house more demanding plants.

When the first road and bridges made out of hardened plants were erected 3 cycles have passed during that time my first mushroom has matured. And surprisingly it evolved on its own probably due to the steady rise of mana in the air. The new evolved mushroom didn’t look that much different than the original one except a new one was glowing and outputting helium on it’s own.

I copied it’s internal structure and spread it out in the whole dungeon. Helium is harmless in small doses but in higher quantities will be harmful. Okay now anyone that will take breath in my dungeon will die by organ failure and mana intoxication, grimm but what can ya do.

The fissure I’m in right now will be expanded into a sphere with many ledges filled with plant life. Around the walls to the ceiling will be placed roads made out of fungiwood that I will soon develop, that are wide enough for 3 current queens to walk side by side.

I’m hoping that during excavation I’ll find iron and coal. If I do find it next to the current colony will be placed a tunnel to another spherical space that will be twice as big as the core room. The purpose of the room will be to cultivate plants that need high heat to live and to smelt ore.

In the opposite end of the core room will be placed another tunnel that will connect to a farm that will cultivate plants and mushrooms for all my critters so that they won’t need to use mana to live.

While it isn’t certain how deep I am It would be nice to be near the surface so I have a place to put all of the excess stone. Right, I should probably begin cutting stone into bricks so eventually I’ll be able to make a fortress on top of my connection with the surface.

Right now the biggest priority is to expand the core room and dig to the surface. It would take an ungodly amount of time for my Zodarii and Napkins to dig the space so I helped them out whenever I had time. 

My next thing on my timetable was to try to make mana purification plant as well as liquidyfication one. My theory is that when exposed to a big amount of pure mana the animal and plant will evolve into something better. 

So I began with pumping my mana into stone dust that I prepared beforehand, hoping it would turn into mana crystal dust. My hopes were crushed when all that happened was dust slightly blue. I didn’t feel it was absorbing or giving away any mana so I tried to infuse it with Helium shroom in hopes I could later modify it into using that dust as a collector of mana. It worked somewhat because the mushroom collected the mana but it wasn’t purifying it or making it into a liquid.

Seeing my failure I increased my efforts into enforcing my will on this poor mushroom. It gave in after 5 cycles of constant mana pumping. Suprisngly it needed a lot of stone to sustain itself and I mean It crumbled and absorbed stone like it was nothing it was so fucking hungry I had to sacrifice next 10 cycles for just spawning Zodarii.

Right now the swarm of them was in thousands, quickly expending resources such as plants to make new bridges and everything I could think of to increase the productivity even slightly. Micromanaging the whole swarm was giving me a serious headache so I thought It’s time to give them limited sentience.

I got to work immediately. First, I expanded all of their carapaces and reinforced muscles and gave them some compact lungs so they could sustain their huge frame in nature. All of the excess space was filled with fat and brain matter. Lastly I dumped half of my reserves into the queen with intent for her to be sentient.

I overdid it quite a lot. Firstly I blacked out. Secondly after waking up I found out that my swarm broke up into smaller ones and began cannibalizing each other because of lack of food. It seems like when I blacked out I forgot to give them order to feed on mana. Fuck