None are sure of the source of the Monster Waves. Long records from the first era record no such phenomenon, and yet in the modern day, they are as important as the tides to the tidal empires. The only hint discovered by scholars across the ages is some possible connection to the labyrinths.
Quote from The Strangest Arcanum, author unknown.
A week after Azotreh entered a nearly hibernative state, Atu watched some strange movement from the giant heart in the wall.
It had kept beating as Azotreh slept, but did very little otherwise. It didn't even emanate an aura, and the eye sitting in its center was blank.
But now, the eye retracted into the heart, and massive teeth made themselves apparent as a nightshade puma fell free from it.
She had seen the puma before; it was the preferred body of one of the personalities. Errazorrus, she believed.
But the puma's sudden appearance wasn't everything. It had the spark of intellect in its eyes, and as it emerged, she saw movement from across the core room.
The core room was spherical with a slightly flatter floor. It had a bookshelf seemingly made from bone up against one wall and a large pile of various valuable items in the center. A pile which had grown as Azotreh slept.
The emerald rabbit-kin, with new homes, had been deeply grateful to Azotreh for granting them a new home and safety beyond Asergia's tyranny. While they weren't wealthy by any means, they were still looting monsters spawned by the dungeon and sometimes venturing to the surface in teams to hunt for more normal food. They contributed many of the bones, coins, or other body parts from their hunts to Azotreh as a sign of their thanks.
But the pile shifted as two other figures emerged. One, a towering orcish figure. The other, a mass of blue slime.
She felt their auras push free from their bodies simultaneously and overlap. Azotreh didn't have any aura abilities or even the passive bonuses from a dao or conception, but the tri-layered aura would still have been oppressive to anything of their rank.
Yet, when the orc looked at her, she didn't see Nicholas' green eyes, but a pair of gray flat ones. The same for the puma. They ignored her, and both the puma and slime left the core room while the orc remained to once again begin beating the wall with its bare fists.
She was curious about it, but was still on guard to protect Azotreh's nexus. It was a task she'd taken up herself as Azotreh slept.
Anthei returned after another hunt in the depths. She'd been passing the time doing so of late while planning how to get Azotreh to unlock the potential of their heroic bloodline. But instead of the regular stillness, she found the spiders at the main tunnel's entrance in motion, reweaving their webs that were torn through by the fey that paid Kurdan a visit.
But she didn't sense Azotreh's aura from any of them. Her aura was more than strong enough to reach the fifth spider, and while all of them carried fragments of Azotreh, none held a reasonable amount. Azotreh was still asleep.
She wondered what was happening, but decided to ask Mukurric. Not like she could speak to spiders anyway.
She headed to the secondary entrance carved by Azotreh themselves, passing two blue slimes and a large puma on her way through. All three were something Azotreh had repeatedly called a "champion," though she had no clue what that meant. She knew that the surface species had a namescheme for the categories of monster, but she was pretty sure champion wasn't one of them. Maybe Azotreh just called their elites something weird?
She wasn't sure.
The puma carried an instinctive understanding of its own capabilities and desires. The abnormal form it had and its connection to its creator. It knew that its creator sought power, and that what it gained, its creator would gain in return.
Its creator had been flagrant in its use of it. Killing it gave them some benefits, but not nearly enough in its eyes. So, as it discovered itself, it would use its form to better understand the world its master sought understanding of.
[Due to your bond with Nexus: Azotreh Nightshade, you can access Skill System functionality.]
[You have inherited Azotreh Nightshade's quests as their direct subordinate.]
[A small amount of your progression will automatically be transferred to Azotreh Nightshade.]
Skill system? It didn't know of such a thing. It felt a sudden new weight on its body, as if its body had grown denser. It struggled to stand for a moment before just deciding to remain on the ground.
The slimes at its sides were in much the same place, having flattened to the ground instead of taking on their semi-spherical normal shape.
[Due to your archetype, your interactions with the Skill System have changed.]
[Your Potens have been limited to Body, Mind, Soul, Core, Origin, and Base. Poten progression will transfer a small amount of the cultivated poten to your creator.]
[Your creator has the maximum number of skills they can sustain. You cannot gain new skills for them.]
It knew what poten advancement was, but only through its bond to its creator. But it couldn't progress in such a way. It had no instincts to do so and no capability to focus on such a thing.
[You will naturally accumulate one unit of your six potens every minute you remain beyond your creator's influence.]
Convenient.
The Creator had created ten of their number in the early days, but had done little with their kind since.
Their workers had been used to dig, but had little capacity to move solid stone with their mandables. They were too small to deal reasonable damage to a monster, or to assist their creator in most ways. The only way they had discovered so far was war with another colony, to both stimulate the growth of the other through their deaths and possibly bring new resources back to the creator.
Now that there hadn't been any scouting parties lately due to the creator's absence, the seven champions had been reconstituted. It would allow their soldiers to better coordinate a war front.
Of course, they couldn't be allowed to truly conquer their rival colony. Their creator had made that explicit. They were to cultivate the growth of their rival and the other fauna in the vast dome. Even if their core instinct screamed to wipe the rival colony from the face of the construct, they could not deny what their purpose was.
But now they had one other problem. They had a large chamber filled with bones and other material from the humanoid fuzzy creatures and from their own creator's efforts. But not enough space to lay their eggs.
Their colony needed numbers if it was to challenge the biodome and perhaps expand the territory of their creator. But they had only workers and soldiers without assigned roles due to the lack of space. The core room was simply no longer hospitable to them or most others.
The tallest champion was attempting to offset the storage problem with a secondary room, but that was slow going and wouldn't fix their problem.
So they had a new solution.
The creator had a perk they hadn't used, a room to spawn monsters.
Considering the single room layout the creator currently had, they simply needed to carve a space to those specifications, and it would become a dedicated room. A room dedicated to the spawning of their kin, and the continued advancement of both their creator and of the dome beyond.
Hadruga had left her clan early. The sun had barely risen, and the second moon was still high in the sky. She could still see some of the glimmering lights of the twin stripes to the west as the sun rose.
She wasn't alone. With her was her most trusted mage, Prokt.
Prokt was a peculiarity among the rabbit-kin, having descended from one scholar of the topaz clan and a mage from the amethyst clan. After that fool Yajri took control of the topaz clan, the child, and both of her parents had made their way to Hadruga.
Prokt had a naturally high attunement to the concept of bonds and was one of the few that primarily followed the path of bond cultivation rather than concept advancement. But it also gave her a rather large leg above every other mage in the clan in terms of sympathetic magic.
She had gotten a sample of the weird mana colored slime that had shown up around the emerald rabbit-kin village. The small creature had been found consuming a small bird before being placed in temporal suspension to track it back to its source.
The enchantment was difficult to use and cost more than a dozen monster cores each hour it was active. It would also likely kill the slime once it returned to the regular time stream of the forest, but that was okay. They only needed to track where it came from.
There were still some of her teams out hunting down the small organisms, though she had stopped sending out small expeditions after rumors of Golchids running around had reached her. If the broodmother had laid her eggs, then it was better that she was going to find where the emerald rabbits had disappeared to.
If she could find them and perhaps bring several of the topaz rabbit-kin to her side as well, their species might not have to put themselves so heavily to survive the monster surge.
She had a half dozen guards around her, all of them zinc-rank, with a single copper. She wouldn't bring out her few ruby-ranked kin for a simple expedition. They were simply too valuable, and she needed some reassurance that the clan would persevere if she failed out here. Ruby rankers were her only assurance.
She moved through the forest right beside Prokt as the rabbit-kin guided them. The other wore a strip of cloth over her eyes, stopping her sight. She insisted it was helpful, allowing her to better observe the weavings of the bonds. Hadruga had no idea how one observed without eyes, but wasn't willing to put it past the rabbit-kin.
She followed until finally, the group found themselves before a waterfall.
She checked her Map, the glowing system window manifesting before her, showing the nightshade region as a whole.
"Blueshine… are you sure?"
"Yes, chief. The bond leads down from here, so I assume there's a cave nearby."
One of the guards turned his gaze around and then spoke, "Chief Hadruga, there's a cave behind that waterfall." The guard pointed at the blueshine waterfall itself.
Before she could approach, however, a figure emerged from the trees behind her.
Towering, the dragon Mlenolops, currently in a humanoid form, released a burst of aura straight down.
The rabbit-kin froze like deer under the eyes of a wolf as the nearly eight-foot-tall humanoid continued to emit his aura in waves, clearly attempting to call upon someone or something.
The target became clear a moment later as a second draconic humanoid emerged from the waterfall. Mukurric looked at the amethyst rabbits for a moment as she blanketed them in her aura and silently guided their bodies without them realizing it.
Before any of them had realized it, they were behind the waterfall and passing into a colossal, dim dome. Two towering orcs before them, and two rabbit-kin beside them. One was Atu, one of the rare direct children of the Lord Rabbit and an outsider to the emerald rabbit-kin.
The other, Hadruga didn't recognize. She could already tell this was going to be a strange negotiation.
Mlenolops glared down at the smaller draconic woman, his black eyes glistening with curiosity and fury.
"Why have you entered my territory, Mukurric?" He asked, his voice a rumble that shook the very weave of arcane power around them.
"The old mushroom found another potential candidate with a high capacity to take on the final spot. Higher even than your precious scion. So he asked me to train them."
"You dare-"
"Don't say it, Mlenolops. You know the only reason that girl has any capability is because you've spent the last two thousand years in some little study. Your precious herb gardens are now of no use in getting her your draconic bloodline, right?"
"My experiments are none of your concern."
"Yes, they are, Mlenolops. If she ascends to a true draconic bloodline, Goli will come after her, just as she did with both of us in our youths. I won't protect the girl against the brood."
"She shares your blood, too, Mukurric."
"She shares only your blood Mlenolops. She has no passion for the preservation of history nor for combat. Only your obsession with passing the secrets of draconic life onto another."
"If you won't defend my scion, why should I assist yours when Goli finds them? You said they had a higher capacity for his position than mine. What kind of dragon could they be anyway?"
"That I won't share with you, Mlenolops."
"And why not? Are they another beast like you and Ferostopol?"
"No, they belong to an archetype I don't know. And don't speak as if you also aren't a beast. You share the archetype."
"But you know what I don't share? A weakling origin. I was always a dragon, unlike you and that battle-starved maniac."
Mukurric's aura didn't waver, nor did her face. But Mlenolops knew he'd struck a nerve.
"I hope your scion is burned in a lab explosion. Now, what do you want for me entering your territory without permission?"
"You think me so cruel-"
"Why else would you be here, Mlenolops? If you weren't looking for restitution, you would have left the moment I mentioned the lich."
Mlenolops looked at her for a long moment before nodding, "Your candidate either has some way to control slimes or destroy them. Don't deny that, I've seen monsters of the same composition through a couple of Eyestalks. They don't have the central core of an ooze, but are still clearly monsters.
"I want the slimes currently invading my territory removed, Mukurric. Send the child and have the things removed, or I will be forced to use the relic to remove them."
"You'd go that far to remove a pest?"
"They consume and consume until nothing is left. They are nothing but a parasite. I'd rather incur the old one's wrath than let them continue to prosper."
Mukurric paused, taken aback slightly at the old dragon's capability. But she still nodded, "I'll see what I can do."
She then turned around and went back into Azotreh's dungeon, feeling the draconic aura of Mlenolops recede as she sighed.
"Ever more complications on Azotreh's shoulders…" she muttered to herself.