When the excavation was finished, the room looked like a rectangle, similar to the 7th floor. The ceiling was far out of reach of the ground, a necessity since The Core wanted to have floating islands. It would be tricky trying to set up the levitating lava islands, seeing as they were going to be made of molten rock, which doesn't constitute a good rune engraving material, since everything written on it would be ruined by either dripping down or getting smudged by lava from above. It could also continuously use mana to sustain its levitation, but that would require constant attention, lest everything fall down. Therefore, it needed to do a trick it was already familiar with, as it had made this type of floor before.
Although calling it a trick wasn't the most appropriate term, considering that The Core would just be creating a Lava Raller and letting it do all the work. It only got the idea for this floor later on when it was remaking its dungeon into a fire-themed one, after witnessing a particularly creative Lava Raller float along with a ball of lava into the air. The species didn't usually do that, as it was a waste of mana and not particularly conducive to survival, but when they had an abundance of mana and a lack of danger, they didn't mind making what could potentially be classified as art using lava and, by extension, making islands of lava float.
The guarantee of a lack of danger wasn't reassuring, as invaders would be coming, and although The Core wouldn't want them to enter its 15th floor, it was also aware that the possibility existed. However, it also didn't think it needed to change anything. A Lava Raller's skin looked identical to lava; one would have to strain their eyes to differentiate it from its environment. And why would somebody want to do that if the monster wasn't attacking them?
Sure, having a non-attacking monster left The Core feeling sour, but what other choice did it have when having an entire island of lava floating would require a Lava Raller's full attention? If the monster wanted to do anything else, the island would run the risk of sinking, and since it wanted to have water at the bottom, that would end in disaster.
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The Core created a lot of lava, raising the floor's ambient temperature but thankfully short of melting the other rocks that made up the surfaces of the ground. Then it created a Lava Raller, a snake-like creature with thick, rough skin the color of lava that camouflaged it perfectly, along with a lack of eyes, nose, or hearing holes. Instead, it perceived through vibrations and the flow of lava. It breathed through its skin when it emerged from lava, and it could hold its breath for up to 4 hours.
The Lava Raller went to work to make himself more comfortable and rallied the lava into a ball around himself, since he decided to use all the lava available to him at that moment the sphere turned out giant. Then The Core told him to make that ball float, and he complied immediately. The Lava Island didn't yet look like how The Core imagined it would, so it projected the image of how it should look into the Lava Raller. It took a long time for it to translate the image into a series of lava flows that the dungeon creature could actually understand, but once it did, the monster executed the set of instructions perfectly. Now the island looked like one and was traversable too! If you could call the more solid rocks in the middle of it that were in what was supposed to be a straight line but ended up looking much more like a zig zag pattern that could potentially be jumped on as a traversable path. The Core wondered if it should tell the Lava Raller to fix the rock positions but decided against it; this way, it would be more challenging!
It proceeded to repeat the process until it had 13 islands levitating in place. The one that was meant to house its core and boss monster was bigger than the others; it had to be. Now the only thing left regarding landscaping was to create water on all the available surfaces that weren't lava. The Core didn't even need to make light runes because the islands were faintly glowing on their own! Although it really was a faint glow, so it might reconsider that when it finished the floor.
It quickly filled the bottom of the room with water, the easiest part of the task. Next, it needed to engrave sticking runes on the walls and ceiling; otherwise, the water wouldn't stay there. It did so, also an easy task all things considered. The runes weren't complicated. Then it used them as intended with water, finally fulfilling the terraforming requirements it had for this floor. Now the only thing left was the monsters.
