“I, am a genius!” Kazue sent to her husband and wife. She’d just figured out a solution to needing their zones better fleshed out with enough inhabitants to fill all roles. Over the past few weeks, it had beeing harder to spend enough mana that they didn’t feel bloated, as word had spread quite thhly now and they were getting groups of people from all over to challehe bat path: tengu hunting parties, elven scouts, dwarven warriors, Kuic soldiers, meraries, and more. Most groups that were not explicitly training newer people were managing to at least reach the library, and many were clearing it, as she and Mordecai were keeping everything at normal difficulty instead to tune up to match strroups.

  Fewer were clearing the mushroom forest, and so far no one who had tried to brute force their way through had made it, as that drew the ire of both war bands who were eager to practice their raining now that the Trionean soldiers had pleted their tract. And only a handful in the past couple of weeks had mao clear the river. But all of this had still required carefully shuffling their bunkin and rabkin about as needed.

  The non-bat path was somewhat less popur, but herbalists, druids, and alchemists were able to find rare ingredients there and often brought something new with them as well. Additionally, some groups were specifically bringing their kids with them in order to send them to meet Kazue’s challenges while the parents started knog the rust off their own skills on the bat path. There were even a few knowledge seekers who were willing to work their way to the library in order to start doing research, and Kazue and Mordecai had agreed to a standard trade of oo-them work of writing in exge for twice that amount of written material copied from the dungeon’s library.

  All in all, they were being a rather busy dungeon now. This was why this solution was going to be useful, it also fulfilled Kazue’s o make her path properly challenging. She mentally giggled to herself as she started assigning new roles. Genius was overstating it, but it had been fun to say.

  “What are you doing love?” Came Mordecai’s query as his core focused on what she was doing. “Wait, are you sure you want to do that? And here I thought you were supposed to be the nie.” His ent just made Kazue giggle more.

  Moriko’s attention had been thhly grabbed by this versation, “What is our wife up to now?” she asked Mordecai.

  “Our wife has decided to take advantage of Little Li’s gift of faeries. She’s assigning them roles of quest givers, stagehands, shopkeeps, and so on. This is going to flesh out our numbers properly and make sure were have enough to cover everything at the same time and make the zones properly difficult.” Mordecai was sounding very amused. “After all, would you rather try to iate prices with a reasonable bunkin, or would you rather try and expin what you want to a fairy, and try to keep them on track long enough to plete a versation?”

  “Oh, that is mean. And it seems that this Kazue agrees that it is a brilliant idea. I thought we married a nice, sweet little fox?”

  Kazue preteo igheir banter and did her best to proje aloof, haughty air. This was not easy to do while trying to trol her desire to ugh gleefully as she finished assigning faeries new roles, freeing up enough bunkin and rabkin that both the bat side and the challenges side were pletely staffed in all zones.

  “And done!” She said with satisfa as she felt the subtle shift that meant she could begin work on their zone. “Mordecai, any st-mihoughts or ges?” She’d been itg to do this for a bit and did not want to wait any longer. Her husband had no objes, so Kazue began with ging how the river ended. She kept the ke but created a new river from the ter of it. The roations dividing the ke stayed, and the new river grew out from the ter of the ke, so delvers were going to be forced to nd their boats to tinue on. The river flowed into a unnel, with about twenty meters of nd on each side to give people plenty of room to walk down. Theunually widened out into the start of their zone.

  As she created more of this zone, Kazue grew the spaternally even as she cimed more territory. The river slowly widened as it lengthened, growing shallower aually breaking off into several smaller rivers separated by soft earth, then spreading out even more until there was a rge, wide expanse of terraihe differeween ‘nd’ and ‘water’ had bee blurry. At the far end of the zohe level of the nd dropped enough to form a shallow ke. For now, she kept with a single exit. A quick examination told her that there was roughly five times as muternal space as had been cimed externally, a ratio that Mordecai said should tio increase.

  Ba at the river, right before it started dividing into several smaller rivers aas, she created a bridge across it, making sure it was wide and broad enough to support several buildings and lots of people. This was going to be much like the previous town, a hub for mutual trade and for potentially switg paths, as well as the pce tuides and helpers.

  But it wasn’t time to build out the town more than that yet, it was time to give the pe life. This was going to be their marshy delta terrain, so the appropriate sele of pnts and trees o grow. Their catalog had grown quite nicely, and it was fun to start using the pnts that hadn’t been suitable elsewhere.

  This was their only real wetnds area, so Kazue wa everything she could in. She decided to simply tier everything by how salty it liked its water, starting with fresh water he river, and slowly making everything more brackish until they reached the now-salty ‘ke’ at the far end. Ecologically it was still a mess, pnts that did not normally grow in the same area were now growing side by side, and they even had some pnts that teically belonged in a tropical rai, but they could monitor and adjust things as they went.

  Add in a thick yer of perpetual fog and mist, remove some of the glowing crystals that normally decorated the dungeon’s ceilings, and make some of the other crystals glow in various dim colors, and you have a very difficult terrain to navigate, and it was easy to lose your way too. Hmm. Maybe she could even… she was out of mana.

  What?

  “I told you that levels start to get more expensive,” Mordecai ented.

  “But, we had so much mana, I thought for sure we’d be able to finish the whole zone.” She wasn’t pletely out, that was almost impossible as there was always more ing in, but she’d mao deplete their stores of it, and Kazue hadn’t even finished designing the level itself, let aloart creating special challenges aures. Well, it looked like she’d have to wait. In the meahey at least had a final challenge for the victors of the river zoo make their way through. Oh, is, she had enough left to work in some normal biting is and some basic small is. The rest was going to have to wait.

  “Well, I have something to show you that should distract you for a while.” That drew Kazue’s curiosity and she let her attention shift to where he wanted her to focus.

  While Kazue had been building out their eighth zone, Mordecai had been paying attention to the patterns of the potential manaforms that had been building up. With an even-numbered zohey should be able to cim another pair… there. Perfect, the one he’d been hoping for was settling into pext to her core. As for his owion, he decided on the ohat seemed most immediately useful to their situation.

  When Kazue was out of enough mana to do signifit work onds zone, he brought her attention to him. “Remember when I showed you how to see the individual nodes for our bosses? I need you to shift into that way of looking at things. Now, we are going to start filtering things out one by one.” He talked her through the process of isoting the energy patterns he wao show her. It was not at all unusual that she hadn’t noticed yet, there were so many different webs and patterns that their cores ected to that figuring out how to filter down to only this specific yer was something that took most dungeons a few years at the least. Instincts and natural development in respoo as did well enough until then.

  Once she had the right yer as her focus, Mordecai began pointing out the specific patterns iion. “As a dungeon grows, it gains various abilities that are not gained by all dungeons. They are not really so muique as just ized seles based on your nature. I mentioheming when we first started w on the duogether. This node over here is where the pattern ects to your side, redug the capacity burden for cute creatures as inhabitants, while I have a simir one fon-like creatures. This is the hat formed when you started making so many of our inhabitants fully se. And now I show you why I have waited so long to teach you how to see these.”

  He pointed out the he pattern still finalizing its attat to her side of the core. “This one is special. I’ve only ever seen one dungeon with it before, so I k ossible, and it is a perfect fit for you. I don’t think I could be quite the right sort of person for it. Do you wao tell you what it does, or do you want to figure it out?”

  “Mmm, let me try.” She replied, and he pulled back to just watch her for a bit. He was a little amused that she ‘thought out loud’ for something like this the same way she often did physically. It was cute. “So, if this ies to each of our inhabitants, and this is what lets us build shortcuts, then it looks like the new oies to… uests? But what is it doing? Hmm. It’s a boon of some sort or it would have to overe instinctive resistahat bit there looks like it’s trading off higher power for… frequency? So it only be used so often, but it is always there? That doesn’t make sense, wait, yes it does, if it’s a tingency.”

  She’d taken to lessons about spell craft quite readily, and her analysis of the node showed how well she’d correted that to the dungeon’s special type of magic. There ulse of pleasure and surprise from her as she figured it out. “I have it! It keeps people from dying! Well, somewhere between that and instant resurre. But there’s a restri, looks like it creates feedback that makes it uer on a person very often. Looks like once a year?”

  Mordecai was quite pleased with her analysis. “Correct. It also will teleport the person to a safe area, though we have some flexibility oly where that is.” it also put the person and their gear into the dungeon’s trol for a moment, letting them extract material penalties if they chose, depending on the circumstance, “And if you want to focus on this ability, additional nodes enha to be avaible more often, but at the cost of new abilities. I think it eventually be reduced down to once a day. But that is for the future. For now, however, I think we should not advertise it. I don’t want to ence too much recklessness. But it is a nice safeguard.”

  Kazue fell silent a moment, and he waited until she fihinking and asked, “How do you know about this ability already, and why did you o keep these a secret?”

  “I had a friend once who had this ability. He was a very nice person, whom I would have loved to be able to introduce you to. Unfortunately, something happeo him. I don’t know the full story, but from what I gathered from one of his inhabitants who mao flee when the body of the dungeon started to colpse after the death of the core, I think he was tricked into trusting the wrong person.” The memory ainful, but not the worst of what he had to bear. “There are some people who have trouble seeing a like them as real people. I don’t know if it was hate, fear, reed that motivated them, for dungeon cores be as valuable as dragon scales and the like to the right person. And I didn’t have the same level of resources as I would turies ter and it wasn’t an attae, so I couldn’t use the same tricks to gather the forces I o find out.” He sighed mentally, then moved on to her other question.

  “As for why I held back, I was worried that knowing this power was avaible would have you thinking about it too much. I wao keep your siy ‘naive’, for ck of a better word. I wao make sure it came to you instead of you chasing it. I think for this particur ability, chasing it would have been terproductive. If I had shown you how to see the nodes, and how to see the potential ones f, there would have been no way to hide this specific ability f. And I very much wanted you to be able to have this, I think it would have hurt you very badly if someone had been actally killed in a fight or challenge.”

  Kazue gave it thought for a little while before she responded. “Yeah, that was a good reason. I’m gd I didn’t push for what you were hiding. Thank you Love, you’re really thoughtful about things like this. And I am sorry about your friend.”

  Moriko’s voice joihem now. “I’m sorry about your friend as well. And I think that this was a wonderful gift for Kazue. Her avatar is ecstatic at the news.”

  The warmth of their feelings was a sweet soft joy to him, and Mordecai allowed himself the time to just enjoy it for a little while before turning his attention back to the rest of the dungeon.

  Zagaroth