Matthias meditated on all his fairies had told him. He kept getting distracted by his low mana stores. It had cost him another two percent to make the ocean a complete ecosystem. It had felt right, but his recovery felt so slow. So he was left just messing with what he had.

  Due to his bonds with his fairies, he had little moats of infernal and celestial mana. Not enough to taint or corrupt him, but enough that he could distill and play with it. The two pushed away from each other like two positive sides of a magnet.

  Matthias was sure he had seen the energies mix before, and depending on where he got the mana from, it changed the ratios of what bits of energy were in it. From gathered resources, he got mostly celestial. From combat, he got more motes of infernal mixed in.

  The celestial moats felt like they leaned hard into order. If he had to describe it, celestial mana was like clockwork cogs—but they did not spin. No, these cogs held things in place. On the other hand, infernal energy felt more free-flowing. It felt like the concept of burning brighter, but also burning out faster. Freedom, but tinged with entropy.

  Despite their opposing natures, Matthias could see a way for them to fit together. He was sure he could. If celestial mana were hexagons, then infernal mana was triangles. He just could not put his finger on what he was seeing.

  He bent his mind to pushing the two closer. He could feel a tension building as he tried to name what was on the tip of his tongue. And then the two met, and the world stopped.

  His mana condensed into a single point of chaos in that frozen time. Matthias was horrified, as though he were seeing something that he was not supposed to. So many concepts seemed crushed into this point. He was about to try to pull it all apart when he felt that caress on his mind again.

  His truth of Knowledge Is Power once again blazed in his soul as he stared into the chaos before him. The fact that he was even contemplating attempting to pull this roiling mass of chaos apart struck him as odd. There was so much conflict within it that there was surely no way he could. Yet his truth assured him he could.

  "Because stuff is made of stuff," he chuckled to himself.

  That caress on his mind seemed to grasp onto that phrase. Knowledge Is Power blazed like the sun in his soul.

  [Stuff Is Made of Stuff acquired as a second augmenting Truth.]

  Matthias swore he could feel cheekiness in that message, like whatever was behind the system was amused at the simplicity and overwhelmed by the breadth of that truth.

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  Looking at the ball of roiling chaos again with his new truth, he could suddenly see all the various concepts that made it up. And yet there was a single thread throughout that called to him personally.

  Gently, like undoing a knot, he drew out that single thread. At first, it was so thin that it looked naught but gossamer. But the more he pulled and pooled it, the more vibrant it seemed. The more he recognized it.

  This had the same feel as the blood that leaked from the eggs that formed around the creatures he fused or upgraded. But it had no true name yet. He could feel the chaos try to reclaim this ephemeral concept even as he worked to gather it, to understand it.

  As he distilled it and the ball of chaos shrank, his mind began to make connections. He began to remember more about his old life—remembered things he had not thought about in years, even when he had still been alive.

  The thread he was pulling almost snapped due to his distraction, and he wrangled his aching mind to keep pulling. But his thoughts kept leaping, hopping from one concept or idea to another. The more he pulled on the thread, the faster those connections formed.

  With the last of his will, he pulled, and the rest of the chaos unraveled into more of this thread. The connection in his mind finally clicked—the concept that had been evading him.

  Bios.

  From what he remembered of his time in school and being forced to copy the dictionary, bios was the concept of life with purpose. Life with narrative. Not just life. Not just vitality. Neither an immovable object nor an unstoppable force.

  He felt the concept permeate his mana and watched as his core changed once again. The light at its center winked out and became akin to a black hole at the heart of a galaxy. All the mana Matthias earned flowed into it and came back out as the energy of bios—a long, unbroken thread.

  As time slowly began to resume, it finally clicked how he had arrived at bios. Celestial mana had been like raw zoe—raw life force with no flow or purpose. Infernal mana was evolution. He had not realized what he was forcing together, and that was why he had created chaos. It was why he had needed to manually undo the knot he had inadvertently made.

  Matthias felt so much more alive now. The concept of bios burned in his core like another truth. But it was still a small thing, not powerful enough to reach out beyond the bounds of his dungeon yet. He could tell it was his duty to nurture this concept to maturity, to mold his dungeon around it.

  The irony was not lost on him that he had already been doing exactly that.

  For the first time, Matthias felt like he understood the true reason dungeon cores existed. And that meant someone had taken steps to ensure that dungeons could no longer even attempt to carry out this duty. No wonder this world seemed so barren and lacking.

  Matthias felt a surge in his mana regeneration as any action that validated his concept now seemed to feed him mana. Not just adventurers killing his monsters or harvesting resources. Not just when his monsters slew other forms of wildlife. But any action that could be attributed to life acting with purpose now filled and swelled his reserves.

  Every birth, every death, every spell cast, every command uttered—it was all bios. A tapestry laid out before him, far more vast than he could currently comprehend.

  With this newfound depth of power, Matthias turned his attention back to his dungeon. Not to manage it for once, but to truly appreciate how it had slowly changed into something more than what he had originally designed. How each creature had evolved to meet the pressures it faced.

  An odd contentment swelled within him, even as he thought about what this meant for his future—and the coming war.