Half a dozen more pigeons swarmed over the fifth floor.

They were still right little monsters, swooping at the bats like they owed them money; the bats, for their turn, had gotten very good at weaponizing their wretched screams to spook the pigeons away. A proper rivalry.

Just a slightly annoying one, because both sides had been fighting so much instead of finding mates, and that meant I was still having to replenish their numbers by hand. Which was expensive.

But while I had to sweat and work to keep the populations up on the fifth floor, something else was doing it for me.

Remember that little thimbleful of mana I'd put on the first floor? The bugs had gone mad for it, willing walking into death just for a chance of it. But that had been the first floor, where my ambient mana was weakest, given the distance from my core. Still certainly higher than the outside world, but not really impressive. Just a taste.

On the second floor, where there was another thriving bug population, similar story. Stronger but not strong enough. Then the Underlake—self-explanatory for why there was a lack of bugs there. The fourth floor had its share, yes, but living inside tunnels filled with thousands of always-hungry always-active threats in the form of the thornwhip arms was rather unconductive to living a long and prosperous life.

So on the fifth floor, where the mana was fresh and deep, where there were predators but also ample places to hide and sneak, to protect and grow… well. As long as they survived for just a touch, just enough to eat some of the mana-rich jadestone moss or kill another bug, the ambient mana would do the rest.

Messages crawled across my core.

Admittedly, it wasn't exactly a clean pipeline—as fast as they were evolving, the baterwauls were eating them several orders of magnitude faster—and I noticed that again, it was mostly the same species that were evolving, being the ones already gifted enough to have a chance at evolution despite the seemingly larger capacity for mana needed before evolving. The mosquitos, despite needing a mere speck of mana to break past the threshold, hadn't gotten an evolution yet.

But the handful of pale white lights blooming over the fifth were still very welcome.

I pranced on over to inspect them.

The first was another praying mantis, with again only one evolution path available—I tucked him underneath one of the rocks on the floating island he'd ended up on and selected hunting mantis. I'd probably send him back up to the fourth floor once he'd evolve, if just for how more suited to that environment he was; same for the two platemail bugs evolving on a separate island.

Four beautiful eye-spot butterflies are curled up as their eyeblight evolution crawled over them. Welcome little bastards. Sounded terrible but I was rather hoping one of them would die just so I could have their schema—but I'd made a promise. I would never betray one of my creatures that had worked so hard for their evolution. Killing them for my own gain was not how this dungeon worked.

Though as much as I was hyping these evolutions up, they were still only Unranked. It wasn't exactly like they wouldn't end up dying throughout their lives.

Although I was starting to understand just how varied the levels were for the ranks. Both Seros as an underground monitor, a true threat and powerful above his peers, was technically on the same level as a burrowing rat. Right. That made sense.

I was inching towards the conclusion that it had much less to do with overall strength, and more to do with future evolutions. I certainly hadn't known all the fine details before I'd up and gotten killed but I thought that most creatures could only evolve five times until they reached their peak form. So was Unranked just a way to show that they were at their base form?

I shoved the thought away. There'd be time to focus on ranks when my creatures actually started evolving past the first one.

Because as much as there were familiar faces, two new messages waited patiently for my attention.

Your creature, a Brown Ant, is undergoing evolution!

Please select your desired path.

Groundbreaker Ant (Common): Boring through stone to build their elaborate homes, there are multiple variants within this species; warriors, enormously powerful to defend the nest; workers, strong-jawed and clever; and queens, rulers over all.