It was not a good sign for my longevity as a dungeon that I was already sick of adventurers.

Three days, by my best guess; three godsdamn days after an attack before another party had meandered their way through my doors and decided to plant themselves amidst all the things I needed to be doing but was quickly deprived of the time to do so. Fantastic.

And to make matters all the better, they had figured out I was a dungeon just in time for one of them to escape.

Someone upstairs was conspiring against me, I just knew it.

Full of mana again, though. I let the three souls flow through me, rich and taut with knowledge—Collectors for certain, if what snippets I learned of foreign creatures pointed in the right direction. Half of their thoughts were flooded with stormtoothed jaguars and gemfruit maples and magma-core rock snails, giving me all the more delicious ideas to fill my lower floors with.

If I was able to get that far.

No Bronze-ranked mana, though, which was unfortunate. Their mana filled me pleasantly only up to twenty-three points; not enough to strain my core or make me lose the excess, which I appreciated. Gods know I needed every advantage I could get.

My creatures grumbled and hissed but slowly relaxed back to their previous levels of existence, the sudden increase in ambient mana from the three kills trickling through their system. The jeweled jumper merrily ignored the massive blast flooding through his, sucking Lália's body into a dessicated husk with nary a thought to how I might need to break down her corpse into additional mana. Ah well. He'd earned the kill.

The greater crab hissed and clicked but did allow me Nil's body. How generous.

For Brus, however?

He had run. Run out the cove entrance, ready to head right back to the lawless Calarata and bring the Dread Pirate back. At that moment, I hated him almost as much as the man that had killed me.

No sense in festering on that. I had work to do.

I dissolved all of their various knives, confirming what I'd guessed; the thin, narrow blade was for skewering soft-skinned creatures and also a scalpel for harvesting materials, and the wide, curved knife more as a general-purpose blade.

Nothing too interesting in their clothes. Lália had leather boots, but as much as I dissolved them and poked my way through what made them up, it just wasn't enough for me to learn the schema from whatever creature they were made of. Annoying. Looked like I couldn't use just leather or skin to make a schema—but maybe if they brought both leather and something else? Surely some adventurers had to build armour sets that focused on one specific creature, and then my Ressurector title could help me bring them all back.

Questions I had little doubt I would find an answer far too soon for my tastes.

I pushed my way around my first and second floor, healing up creatures with stray threads of mana for those that had been trampled or injured in Brus' panicked run. My jeweled jumper finally finished eating more than his fill and stepped back, practically vibrating under the pressure of all his new mana—he sprang back up the bark of the vampiric mangrove and scuttled deeper into the floor. The rest of my creatures finished settling back down.

Then I finally started poking through the messages skittering over my core.

Your creature, a Cave Spider, is undergoing evolution!

Please select your desired path.

Webweaver (Common): Spiders are a territorial species—but this beast has ignored that and created a communal web, the work of dozens all spanning together to create an inescapable trap. Not yet a hivemind but through releasing pheromones, they communicate across the miles their webs can span, and any foe that falls to them is split evenly between the lot.

Spurred Spider (Common): For defense in the open areas it frequents, this creature has grown armoured spikes of bone and chitin. Though this slows it down, its massively increased bulk and puncturing power of its newly-grown mandibles leaves it well-prepared for any approaching threat.

Jeweled Jumper (Common): Foregoing webs entirely, it spends its life constantly on the hunt, jumping between trees and stalagmites alike in their hunt for prey. As active predators, they ignore smaller insects and use their potent venom to take down larger prey, draining their insides and leaving the husks as a warning.