When The Core went back to its 14th floor to finish its work, it found its core deviating from its previous position.

  That caused The Core to panic because that had never happened before. What could have caused this? Did something touch its core?

  It took a moment for it to figure out that its core had simply rolled away, as ball-shaped objects tend to do on mostly flat surfaces.

  It didn't want its core to be lying around, having the potential to move while The Core didn't want it to, not to mention the fact that it would obstruct its construction efforts. So, it dug out a perfectly circular hole that was exactly the size of its core to put it in. Which it did.

  The Core went back to its 10th floor's pedestal for its core and erased it; it was time to redesign this thing anyway, although not right now since it wouldn't be putting its core on any higher floor than strictly necessary.

  With that done, it went back to searching its monster catalogue for living plants and plant monsters. It ignored the fungi as it did so, since the plan it had in mind didn't involve them.

  Instead, it looked at different types of moss, the perfect plant to start off with!

  It dismissed Necro moss outright; it looked too grey and contained death mana, so it wouldn't fit with the living cave theme. The other types of moss that weren't a shade of green were similarly disregarded.

  On the other hand, the green mosses, even if they weren't mana receptive and thus would only be used for decoration at best, were given a pass and used.

  The Core placed them around on every available surface, with the exception of the hole leading to this floor; that one would be forever bare.

  This made the floor feel much more alive, but it still wasn't enough to suffocate an invader when one entered, so it went to search for more.

  It picked out different types of vines, although it was forced to let go of Hydrofearing vines as they needed water to properly function as a defensive monster, and having a pool of water just for one monster wasn't something it would do.

  It packed them on top of the moss, but even then there was still space; it made the tunnels too wide for this much to clog them.

  Thus, it once again searched for different types of plants that were green.

  It found a few that it could immediately put into the 14th floor's halls and had to modify some others since they were flowering, and it didn't want blossoms growing inside.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  However, when it found Sporefull bloom, which was usually white, it decided that having green flowers wouldn't clash too much with the theme, albeit it wouldn't have come to the same conclusion if it had been a different type of flower.

  But that couldn't be helped, as the Sporefull bloom was what this floor currently needed, in The Core's eyes at least.

  It grew on vertical surfaces, usually tall cliffs, and thus released a ton of spores in the hopes that some of them would manage to grow into another representative of the species. In the mountains, that didn't inconvenience anyone since the wind dispersed the spores, and all of them were sticky enough not to let go of stone once they touched it. Although that didn't aid in growing, as they weren't strong enough to burrow into rock, it sure was helpful when they touched hard soil.

  Having that plant on this floor would help a lot with The Core's plan of suffocating the invaders with plant life!

  However, it still didn't want to let go of the ideal 14th floor that would be all green. While modifying flowering plants to not produce flowers was easy, changing genes so that the flower was a different color was not. Mainly because there was no green gene that it knew of that would do that.

  But it had time, since it didn't think that the invaders would show up anytime soon, so it got to work on making its dream happen.

  As it turned out, manifesting hopes and dreams into reality was much harder than it thought.

  The Sporefull bloom lost its spores; another began to grow blooms rapidly, while the other didn't grow any at all. There was one that would have appeared blue under light because the structure of its petals changed to reflect it in a certain way.

  The Core didn't seem to have any talent in gene modifying, but it didn't grow discouraged.

  Then it received a signal that something was happening on the 4th floor from its Nature Deer and immediately left to check out what that was about.

  It turned out the Foliage Shaper was growing into the 4th floor for some reason, her vines sucking the vitality out of the plant life.

  The Core, not wasting any time as it wanted to get back to its more important task before the interlopers came back, asked her directly what was wrong.

  The response it received was just an intense feeling of hunger; only then did The Core remember that the Foliage Shaper could no longer feed off its mana and instead required actual vitality to live.

  Looking into the 5th floor, The Core noticed that indeed all the plants were withered, along with some of the Foliage Shaper's body; it appeared she started self-cannibalizing at some point.

  It quickly replenished the greenery of its vitality, along with the plants on the 4th floor that had also been sucked dry, while also healing the monster as much as it could since there was no spell that directly countered starvation.

  It then told the Foliage Shaper to get back to her floor, and she did so obediently. However, what it found out now posed a problem.

  The Foliage Shaper couldn't facilitate long-distance communication with it, so The Core would need to remember to feed her on its own, a task it didn't think it was suited for.

  However, since its other monsters could communicate with it, wouldn't it be fine if it just placed a monster whose only job would be to alarm it when the Foliage Shaper became hungry?

  Just as it thought so, it did it, placing a Vampiric Squirrel with the Foliage Shaper, as there simply was no other option when it came to the 5th floor.

  The Core then informed the boss monster of the reason for the newest addition, receiving a burst of happiness in response; it seems she didn't like being hungry.