The edelweiss minion froze - not that it was doing much in the first place.
Warning! Mutation Is Unpredictable and Cannot Be Undone! Continue? Y/N
Yes.
Upgrading Minions...
Refining Impurities...
1 Light Impurity Refined to 10 Dungeon Mana.
The plant glowed blue, then stretched. It grew taller, and it grew a few more flowers, too. Other than that, it didn't seem to have changed much... then the glowing stopped without stopping. The leaves and stems looked the same, but the flower's petals retained a faint luminescence, visible even in the overhead lighting of the dungeon.
Minion Mutated! Edelweiss Has Become Glowing Edelweiss!
Minion Template Unlocked: Glowing Edelweiss.
I inspected its needs. It - didn't have any new ones. It was happy where it was, it had enough water and nutrients. It had a capacitor, which was new, and stored light mana, which was interesting. I focused on the capacitor (which was 3% full and filling) and found a note:
Flash Attack Enabled When Gauge Is Full.
If my plants can attack... then I can feed my bees and improve my defenses at the same time by planting more of them. Wait - if my animal minions can multiply on their own, does that mean that my plants can make seeds?
I opened the glowing edelweiss' menu again and poked at it.
Advanced Options
Population
Reproduction
There! A slider, currently set to zero, to indicate the number of glowing edelweiss seeds that should be in the dungeon as a whole. I adjusted it to ten, then spent the rest of the day setting up easier access to seed settings for plant minions. There was no reason for me to need to interact directly with a minion to change the number of seeds in the dungeon.
The first thing I did with my new tool was to change the number of ordinary edelweiss seeds from zero to twenty-five.
When I looked around, one of the glowing edelweiss flowers had been replaced by a seed pod, and some of the ordinary flowers were starting to change.
It dawned on me, then, that I didn't have a way to get the seeds spread out around the dungeon to grow new plants. Mice could carry things - right?
Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.
I went back to my family of mice. There were three baby mice, tiny and pink, curled up with the mother. The dad mouse was dragging a pine nut into the nest. I opened their menu and assigned the mouse family to "seed distribution," then got a new popup.
Error! Planting Locations for Seeds Undefined!
It didn't take long to go through my dungeon's map and pick out locations for seeds to go. Edelweiss here, glowing edelweiss there - and then I looked at the rooms that hadn't been made yet. I could put more plants in those...
Intruder Alert!
And I could let my minions handle that. It didn't feel big or strong, so I didn't pay it any mind.
The Intruder Has Died!
Minion Template Unlocked: Grass!
I summoned a bit of grass in the first room and messed around with its settings. I set it to make a lot of seeds, put a few planting sites around the dungeon, and enabled dungeon monsters to eat excess seeds if all of the sites were occupied and there were at least twenty seeds planted, waiting to sprout if something happened to the grass that was already growing.
I added a maximum spider population to the first room, then got back to work designing the interiors of the rooms that weren't dug out yet. A depression here, soil there, water here, this decoration by that wall, a mouse nest here, flag that for bumblebees, ten spiders in this room, five in that one... After I finished my design work on each room, I took a short break to watch my bumblebees hover around my flowers and feel how happy they were.
As I worked my way further into the dungeon, I added notes that I needed more kinds of monsters - if I wanted the dungeon to be warmer further in, I'd need monsters that weren't ice themed.
---
Greyex woke with the sun and spent the day hard at work. First, he checked on the kobold: still breathing, better hydrated, didn't mess itself while he was asleep. Good. Next, he checked on his shelter: still standing, didn't shift much in the night. Good. Finally, he checked on the supplies he'd dragged next to the shelter before the sun had set: still there, still useful. Very good.
He spread the grass and branches out to dry the dew off in the sun while he found breakfast, then took a bag and a basket that didn't have too many holes in them and went hunting. He found a bird's nest on a rocky ledge and managed to get three eggs into his bag before the bird came back and found him. Rather than falling off the ledge, Greyex managed to hit the bird with his frantic flailing and broke one of its wings.
The bird went in the bag with the rest of the eggs and he scrambled back to his shelter. He roused Taaku, and when it seemed more lucid than yesterday, asked it a very important question:
"Would you rather have an egg, or a whole bird?"
"How big'sss the bird?" the kobold hissed indistinctly.
Greyex pulled the struggling, now cheeping, bird out of his bag and pressed it into his friend's pet's hands.
"I'll have the bird," Taaku said, then crammed the whole struggling animal into its mouth and, with some effort, swallowed it whole.
Greyex made a face at the kobold, which was already curling up to go back to sleep, and retreated outside with his eggs. He spent some time trying to get a fire going, but had to give up when his hands ached and he started dropping his sticks. He had a sad, cold breakfast of raw eggs, and then had a stomach ache from too much food too fast.
He spent the rest of the day decidedly Not Hungry. He also got the walls for his new goblin hut all the way up, thatched the roof with some mostly-dry grass, and assembled a pile of carefully arranged sticks and dry leaves into a passable bed that was better than sleeping on the ground.
When the sun went down and the sky turned red, he went to climb into the bed, only to find that it was full of kobold already. He climbed in anyway and fell asleep with a warm, scaly body wrapped around him and a heavy, scaly head pressed against his chest.
He slept well that night.
