Doyle could only shrug at the new limits that the elder assassin vines struggled under. Maybe if it didn’t make sense, he would be more annoyed but it was easy for him to see how such a thing would develop. In fact, it might even be his fault for how he raised the assassin vine. While he isn’t sure how to manage it, maybe an assassin vine that constantly had to be on the move would develop differently.

The one he grew after all just sat in one place for its entire life. In the wild, that would represent a relatively safe location with a constant supply of prey allowing it to grow old. Not needing to move but likely losing some prey because of them avoiding it or slipping out of the vines grasp would easily explain the changes.

Still, Doyle is fine with this for now. Maybe later on he would discover other forms of assassin vine but this type would work perfectly on the floor. Not too many though, if only because he only has so many points to spend on them. In fact, after playing around with the numbers a bit, he can only fit two of the elder vines on the floor proper with six in the farm leaving only 15 points spare. He doesn’t need six of them as they come from the regular assassin vines but extras work out in the end.

Though this mostly comes from the difficulty in creating them. While the strange dungeon stone used to accelerate their growth could, in theory, make new elder vines in an instant. Doyle just doesn’t have the spare world energy production to sustain that. So instead, he goes for a much lower speed of about fifty percent faster. Combined with using two stones and only having them active when held by a normal assassin vine brings the cost down below the floors regen rate.

This, however, has the knock on effect of producing elder assassin vines much slower than anything else in the farm. After timing it Doyle very much doubts that if the floor got cleared three times in a row, there would be enough elder vines for a fourth clear. This worry is a bit off at the moment as no one has even conquered the fifth floor, let alone near making it to the seventh.

But who knows what the future might hold. It isn’t like the levels are skyrocketing between floors. Speaking of levels, Doyle remembers to distribute the three free levels each floor gets. In fact, looking back he had forgotten to distribute them on the sixth floor as well. This is luckily an easy thing to fix with the sixth floor’s herb cow getting all three and on the seventh Doyle splits them between the guards.

And with that done, Doyle has two remaining tasks to complete on the floor. The first is easy enough. Since the farm and the floor proper are completely disconnected, he just has to place down a few portals to allow restocking of the floor. Easy enough to do and except for the vines doesn’t really need that many connections. The myconids all get released in a group near the exit while the wolves are the same, but at the entrance.

With the assassin vines, though, Doyle has to spread them out more. While the current batch has had enough time, even for the elder vines, to spread out properly. Who knows if later restocks will have enough time to move around properly. As luck would have it, though Doyle already has a decent idea of where to put the portals. After all, the current batch of vines have found the best places, so why put that to waste? Sure, he doesn’t put them directly on top of where the vines currently are, but he places them close by.

That task finished leaving him with the real doozy. Just like how on the sixth floor he ended up needing to place way too many portals, Doyle had left the most time-consuming task for last this time as well. See, there was this giant blank sphere of stone in the sky begging for some decoration, and what better way to decorate it than with a massive carving?

Of course, before starting on this Doyle takes stock of how the rest of the world is doing. And just a quick glance into the town shows that another chunk of time had passed. More buildings in the inner circle have been completed despite the core group’s constant attempts to find perfection.

More interesting is that while paying attention to the outside world, Doyle feels a pull off in the direction that the returning civilians had come from. At first he didn’t quite get what it was for, but after considering it figures that must be the cows that Moota promised to deliver to the town. It had been a while but Doyle had the feeling that any sort of deal between immortals like dungeon cores and gods wouldn’t exactly be a hurried thing unless requested. Plus, better slow and steady rather than getting them all caught by Jan and eaten.

Satisfied with how things are on the outside Doyle turns toward Ally. To be polite, he did the equivalent of knocking on the front door to get her attention. Then after getting invited in he realizes more than the town had changed. At some point Ally had gotten around to decorating her room. While she couldn’t exactly change the physical nature of the room, that still left her a lot of leeway with her glamor ability.

What had been a mostly blank stone room was now covered in half illusion and half real depictions of nature with trees caught in a constant state of the leaves turning colors before reverting to green. Small drafts of autumn chilled air would flow through the room at random. And the centerpiece of her bed now transformed into a riot of autumn colors that seemed to change when you stop looking at them.

Ally looks up from tweaking the way an illusory leaf fell from the ceiling but then sighs. There isn’t exactly a physical manifestation of Doyle’s attention to focus on. A matter she finally decides to bring up as part of why she had been spying on his core in the past was exactly this matter.

Doyle takes his time thinking over the matter until a second look around the room brings a solution to mind. ‘Why don’t we combine our abilities to give me a more physical presence here in your room? I have control of the dungeon and you can make glamors. All we need to do is have you create a small replica of my core here and I can use my control over the dungeon to sync it up with my actual core when talking to you. I could even move it out of the room when I’m not present.’

Ally laughs, ‘Well that was a simple enough solution. Of course we didn’t realize it until now but I’m sure it is the kind of thing that just wouldn’t have come to mind before this. Anyway, let me give it a try.’

And with that Ally spends a good fifteen minutes or so working on it, even calling up a view of Doyle’s actual core and asking him to make a few expressions. The result is well worth the time spent as while not an exact duplicate it matches close enough that Doyle doesn’t have any trouble syncing his core with the glamor.

Doyle tilts back and forth, ‘Well, this makes things a bit easier for us. I guess it was kind of hard on the relationship with how things ended up working out. Anyway, I’ve got most of the seventh floor set up and wanted to have you take another look at it. The monsters are all in place and I just have to carve up the sphere in the sky as a finishing touch.

‘Oh, and speaking of monsters, I’ve got a few new ones after some playing around. The myconids were easy enough as I let them grow a bit for the lesser myconid and smoosh a handful of those together for a guard. Then I managed to get an elder assassin vine with some strange dungeon stone set to age them quickly.

‘So take a peek and tell me if you see anything out of place. I’ve got a feeling that the floor is balanced but that is just from an ecological standpoint and not difficult or design. I figure you’ve probably seen a few fancy places and could weigh in.’

Ally nods and pulls up a view, or at least tries to. Because of how the floor wasn’t flat and the various spatial anomalies Doyle had put in, a flat view doesn’t work. With a sigh, she then tries to pull up a spherical view and even that fails at first until she figures out how to correct for how deformed the space is.

And right away Ally notices something. ‘There isn’t really much to that spiral you put in place, is there? Here, let me strip away all the extra stuff and display it from one end. Quite a bit of open space in the equator region. Oh, and ignore the wonky lines. You just had to make everything a bit off. Only so much I can do to correct for that kind of thing.’

Doyle nods, ‘It is quite the large space, but that is how I want it. From the beginning, I knew this was how it was going to end up. You just can’t help it when using a golden spiral. Each new arch of it will be twice the size of the last, which will get silly big quite quickly.

‘That is why I used two opposing spirals so that it would shrink back into the exit. This allowed me to use the most possible space while still having the ends be constricted spaces. There is a good reason why you see it so often in nature.’

Ally shrugs, ‘Fair enough, I can see what you were going for here and it isn’t a bad thing. Just something I noticed so I decided to speak up about it. Anyway, besides that, the monster density is also off balance. The early two-thirds or so of the floor are practically empty, with only the wolves and a smattering of vines. Only once you get into the last third does the myconid presence make itself known.’

Doyle takes another look over the floor, and his core dims. ‘Hmm, you aren’t wrong about that. I had originally planned to spread out more clusters of myconids but ended up spending all my points on the two elder assassin vines.’

Ally nods, ‘I can see how that would happen. While not really too expensive, those elders would definitely eat into whatever amount you had remaining. And it isn’t like you could just reduce the number of monsters in the farm.

‘Sure, that would be a couple thousand points, but not enough to really make the first half feel lived in. Maybe you can just leave it as is? We don’t really know how dangerous the lesser shadow wolves will be and the assassin vines might over-perform with the floor’s geometry.’

Doyle’s core brightens up again, ‘True enough. Until we know how well those things will perform, we can’t really make an informed decision. And since the town is still a little ways off from reaching this floor, I can put it to the side for the moment. Besides that though I will need you to pay more attention to the delvers for the next bit.

‘I plan to carve up the entire outside surface of the stone sphere there in the middle of the floor. Going by how I seem to just get into a state sometimes and with how big the project is I might go a little too deep. I would love to say with some certainty that I would notice when they are beating my boss, but even before the system came I could end up reading an entire night and day without noticing it if the book was good. I don’t want the dungeon equivalent of not having eaten in over a day and having to really hit the restroom.’

Ally laughs, ‘Fair enough, I’ve mostly been watching them at the moment, anyway. I’ll just make sure to knock a little harder if something big goes down. Oh, and I’ll keep an eye on the town itself as well. No reason to ignore them when most of our danger at this point either comes from them or will have to go through them to get at us.’

Akhier

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