To my surprise, I hadn’t just leveled. I’d leveled twice.

  I mentally squinted. I could swear the little voice was being sarcastic with these monikers.

  The expansion of my senses was welcome. I could already sense minute details by focusing on living things within my domain, but quantifying them precisely was another matter. Moreover, my sense of magic was undefined and my knowledge crude, giving me at best a hazy guess at the nature of problems like the enchanted sword.

  Speaking of.

  It lay on the edge, surrounded by plants that grew up around the blade. I supposed the Mana leaking out was drawing the nearby life towards it. Now that nobody was holding the sword, it no longer pulled at my own reserves, but simply lay there and acted innocent.

  It didn’t know I could see its secrets.

  I briefly wondered if I should feel bad for this thing. You could go insane quite easily, being a sword for a thousand years. Passing from the hands of noble warriors to cannibalistic scavengers and put to ever-more desperate uses. Your enchantments breaking, fading, your sentience going with them as the knowledge of how to save you was quietly burned out of the world.

  But then- it was a sword. It probably liked killing. It certainly hadn’t stopped the elf from doing his best to slaughter a path through my oasis.

  In the end I wanted to contain it until I had a suitable proxy to wield it. Better yet, I could work on studying these enchantments at a later time.

  I had Lazarus drag it down into the water, and dug a deep pit that I closed up behind, forming a sealed coffin until I found something better to do with the blade. It wasn’t like any of my creations had hands. In fact, Lazarus was down to a single claw, but when I offered to heal him he pushed back, his mind pulsing with a stubborn refusal.

  No. He would grow it back himself, and grow stronger in the process.

  So I turned from him and began to examine the world with new senses. My leveling had expanded the domain in which I could see, bringing in a few more ruins that stuck out of the sand to the east. To the west I’d encountered the salt-plains seen through the buzzard’s eyes. Those definitely merited my attention. Every creature there had adapted in some way to the poisonous environment.

  Dry creekbeds. Quicksands. The real find was below; an earthquake had dug out a fault in the earth, exposing a deep, narrow shaft. In the space between the jagged walls of the tunnel, thin colonies of moss and fungus grew by clinging to the sides and reaching out to drink in light when the sun passed overhead.

  In the basin, I finally found another source of water. A tiny set of stagnant pools created as condensation dripped down the rock, feeding a swarming landscape of insects all jostling for scarce resources, all killing and dying.

  To a dungeon core it was a heavenly garden. A place where natural selection had left me the most dangerous and deadly specimens to study.

  I watched in fascination as small, fat-bellied grubs feasted on a lizard carcass. Whenever another scavenging animal approached they would begin to flare their luminous bellies, and when that failed to drive the nosey creature away, pour electric energy into the corpse. With a dozen or more latched on, the combined voltage was enough to make the muscles spasm; the whole corpse kicked wildly and appeared to come to life, sending the other scavengers back to their dens while the grubs continued to feast.

  The most interesting thing wasn’t their unique strategy but the crystallized organs that allowed them to produce lightning. They reminded me a little of my own core, but the mechanism was designed to harvest tiny amounts of Mana from the air and store it as electric potential.

  I was obviously enthused about the potential to unleash lightning on my enemies.

  Higher on the food chains were the brood-wasps. In the cavernous environment they’d grown flightless, their wings becoming a form of camouflage that resembled the stony walls, covering up the agile, deadly body and lithe sting below. A single bite of that poison needle would fill the victim with eggs and a paralyzing venom to hold them in place while the larvae hatched.

  There were more. I watched with interest as a colony of heavy, white-furred bees subdued an enormous stag beetle by spraying wax across it. Entombed, it could only twitch its remaining limbs helplessly, the assailants spitting out more and more wax until the beast was drowned. As a mob the little bees dragged their prize up the walls towards their nest and anchored it in place with other trophies, all rotting within their wax coffins.

  Workers injected the dead beetle with venoms, slowly digesting the giant into a kind of liquid slop.

  What was interesting was that there was an imposter in the colony. A small, harmless beetle with a diamond body and bristling fur. It looked nothing like a bee, but exuded the right pheromones to blend in. One by one they’d crawl in at the edges of the hive and begin to feed.

  In the place of the liquid meat, they’d secrete their own filler substances to hide the vanishing food supply. It was a good strategy - so long as there weren’t too many imposters. A little too much of their bile in the food supply and the bees would begin dying of starvation. The few times I saw a mimic beetle attacked, it wasn’t by the bees, but another parasite defending its free lunch.

  The combination of wax-based hunting and doppelganger pheromones was fascinating. While the creatures of the world above were highly developed as efficient hunters and gatherers, the creatures in this fissure had developed to use their bodies as tiny factories, producing useful substances.