Chapter 45 Responsibility (Patreon)

                The dungeon did not know what to expect when he decided to take responsibility for these humans, but he did not expect them to be as stupid as they were. The dumbest most stupid thing they did was pooping and peeing wherever they were. This was made worse by the reality that when the dungeon made them he made them with armor and clothing on, so they made a mess all over themselves. The thing was that they had no knowledge, so the dungeon had to unmake all their clothing, and clean them up. It wasn’t hard since their waste was all made with essence, so the dungeon could and did make it magically disappear, but the dungeon never expected to do the magical equivalent of changing diapers.

                Since these humans were not potty trained the dungeon foolishly decided to let them run around naked. Unfortunately, these humans were well past puberty and nature took its course. The males fought over the females, and the population of eleven humans went down to eight before the dungeon noticed. It just reminded the dungeon that once again, although he saw everything in his area of influence at the same time, he could not focus on everything at once, and by the time his focus returned to the humans three had died, and the eight remaining humans paired up.

                Its not that it took very long for him to focus on the new humans, instead the problem was that three of the males had earth cores, and one had a wind core. When the dungeon recreated them he went ahead and made them with their cores and essence channels. Out of the three clones they killed two were made from men with fire cores, and one from someone with a water core. It just wasn’t much of a fight.

                The dungeon did not want these very stupid humans killing each other. He could have made it impossible for them to kill each other by making them little more than robots. The dungeon had long learned how to program biological brains to follow simple orders, but these were humans; they could be so much more, assuming the dungeon could let their intellect grow, and that required freedom. With that in mind the dungeon put earth cores in them and carved the spell durability into them. Durability allowed all the bones, muscles, and organs to borrow the durability of the strongest part of an essence creature, so the dungeon also weaved carbon nanotubes throughout these humans’ muscles, bones, and organs, making them significantly harder to kill.

                As the dungeon weaved carbon nano tubes throughout their bodies the dungeon was surprised to see some massive biological differences between them. For instance one of the humans burned calories far more efficiently than the others, another had a much more efficient circulatory system, two of them had eyes that allowed them to see significantly more into the light spectrum than the others. All of them had interesting random adjustments in their muscles that seemed to be biologically altered. After looking closely at the biology of these humans its clear their biology had been manipulated, and the dungeon assumed the mages are the ones who did it.

                The dungeon’s goal with these humans was to get them to the place where he could talk with them. Even if they only ever developed the communication ability of a three-year-old that was better than talking to the imp every day. He hoped that if he got lucky that, maybe just maybe, they could give him new ideas to help him reach his goals.

                Every day he spent time, through the speaking bear, teaching them how to speak, and it took months for them to learn basic words. The dungeon understood that it wasn’t really these human’s fault they struggled, as the human brain learned language best before the age of ten, and what the dungeon had made were adult humans. That said, the humans did learn language. Both the words in the local language that the dungeon was able to pick up on, and English.

                Despite the humans learning language, albeit slowly, it was obvious that the dungeon wasn’t going to get lucky with intelligent humans. The humans just skipped too many stages of human brain development to ever be the innovators the dungeon needed. That said, although the dungeon did not get lucky, the humans did, and once the dungeon realized that babies were on the way the dungeon watched the new lives grow in the wombs with fascination.

                Although the dungeon told the Imp that he wasn’t going to kill these clones because they should have human rights, he would be lying if he didn’t consider how they could be profitable to him. The dungeon needed innovative humans to help him build electronics. The dungeon desperately wanted to build computers and robots that would allow him to explore the outside world, instead of being cooped up in his area of influence. The dungeon could have, and probably should have kept his last eight humans from breeding, but when he saw they would never be the innovators he needed, he allowed them to do so.

                As far as the dungeon was concerned, the most important part of the fetal development was the development of their brains. Just five weeks after their conception the fetuses began producing brain signals. The dungeon intended to watch their brain develop throughout their life until their death in the hopes that it could help a future generation be smarter and more creative. The dungeon would not do anything terrible like giving future humans thousand-pound brains, but the dungeon felt no compunction about giving them more neurons in parts of their brains if it helped him out.

                The dungeon did not know if this made him a monster or not, he no longer felt emotion. The only thing the dungeon could do was make a decision that the only changes he made to humans would be positive changes.

                The dungeon wasn’t just playing with its new pets, the dungeon was using its new knowledge to upgrade its essence beasts and research how to give them tier-two electric cores. The dungeon fully expected to give all the humans electric cores if only so they can power the electronics he planned to build in the future. But as always things were going slow.

                Although the dungeon’s various projects were going slow, thanks to killing those warriors the dungeons labyrinth was growing very quickly, and was over a thousand feet high, six hundred feet into the ground, and four hundred feet in diameter. As the labyrinth grew so did the population of essence creatures and mana plants. There were so many essence creatures in the labyrinth that mana was beginning to be pulled in from dozens of miles away, while the excess essence from the essence creatures was pushed out of the labyrinth. There was so much mana and essence clashing with each other as they passed it created a whirlwind that extended high up into the clouds, something that was normal to see from a growing labyrinth. The swirling clouds in the sky made the locals very happy as it meant that soon their crops would naturally turn mana rich as more and more mana and essence passed near them. As for the forest surrounding the dungeon it began mutating more quickly, and began naturally producing mana creatures. Most were unstable and died quickly.

                While the dungeon was doing all that, the warriors began reentering dungeons, although now the warriors that came had at least three cores, and they were led by a tier-two warrior. Unfortunately for the dungeon the tier-two warrior managed to mostly protect the tier-one warriors, even when fire warriors lit the liquid hydrogen on fire. In fact, after the warriors barely survived that the dungeon no longer saw fire warriors.

                By this point the dungeon felt that it had done everything it could with wind and earth and began focusing on making electric cores as the dungeon knew how to overwhelm his foes with the power source his people had mastered.