Zagaroth

  Waiting for the ice to finish melting was a little annoying, but it was the only way for Mordecai to be sure that he didn't make any mistakes adapting their inhabitants to the enviro. At least in the mea made for an iing enviroal challenge; even with the airy water runes ihe water was cold enough to be hazardous, plus the occasional flow of slush across the shallower portions of the path could make traversing it difficult.

  So, instead, he turned his attention to the sewer. The diluted dark waters from the underground faerie ke had proven stable when he isoted it, and now the fae waters were carefully introduced into some of the isoted 'wilds' they had preserved when g the main sewer route. These wildnds were kept entirely separate from the main route and all other interference for now; they were o help them maintain Kazue's life-saving boon, thanks to some of the creatures there having crossed the spiritual threshold where the boon would 'notice' them.

  There wasn't much immediate impact when the fae waters mingled with the mire and came into tact with the wild creatures, but after some time spent in observation, Mordecai could pick out a few trends and predict where they were going to develop, though not every creature acquired every trait.

  The first was 'stillness'; those creatures affected by this trait were able to go into a very still, death-like state.

  In this almost-stasis, they could wait indefinitely for a target to approach. ing out of the stasis did slow down the unch of their ambush, but given how hard they were to detect beforehand they could wait until their prey was very close, making that dey matter less.

  The sed was just a simple resistao both void energy and instah spells.

  Death-attuned spells came in two varieties. The spells that could 'simply' cause a healthy target to die were not on and were amongst the highest-ranked spells, though life's natural resilience rarely allowed such a spell to be pletely successful uhere was a vast differen power between the caster and the target.

  Other, more on ones ehe death of targets that were brought to the knife-edge of life ah if the spell was not resisted. Spells desigo take advantage of a weakeate were much harder to resist.

  Targets of such spells pletely died, down to the smallest bit, whi a small twist deyed the o of decay by killing the multitude of minor creatures that were hosted by a rger creature's body.

  The third was the ability to bee slightly spectral.

  They could not bee truly intangible or ethereal, but they could shift slightly out of sync with the physical world. This made purely physical attacks and defenses less effective thaherwise would be.

  The future potential of such a power to bypass physical walls was ing enough to cause Mordecai to double-check the dungeon's ability to tain such creatures. A wild ecosystem like this was not trolled the way inhabitants would be.

  Mordecai maed his avatar near a se of living crystal and cast a spell to make himself intangible before he attempted to walk through it, and theed the test with other variations such as being fully ethereal.

  Living crystal alone proved suffit to stop him from passing through with simple intangibility, while fully ethereal transformations required the living crystal to be infused with Saraag's tendrils, and thus his spiritual presence, before it could prevent Mordecai's passage.

  Naturally, taking a full step into the shadow or faerie realm potentially bypassed such barriers, depending on the physical figuration of that realm retive to the dungeon, but that was not much of a giveure of such realms and a dungeon's spacial pression:

  The shadow realm was already infamous for the treacherous ways in which it pressed and twisted distand dire pared to the mortal world. that with the spacial pression of a living dungeon made it even more perilous than usual for most to travel there. Naturally, dungeon inhabitants who traversed this region were not adversely affected by this bination, though they still had to cope with the effects of the shadow realm itself.

  Faerie was normally a rger step away from the mortal realm and for any other dungeon, it would have the same issues as traversing the shadow realm. For the Azeria dungeon, well, that was no longer an issue as their faerie domain mimicked their duerritory's spacial coordinates, but that did not make it automatically safer for others to traverse. If nothing else, sutruders would be quickly noticed and inhabitants could be diverted to deal with them.

  Mordecai made a mental o ask Satsuki to verify spiritual proje and whether it could pee the living crystal. He wasn't particurly worried about it, that sort of non-physical pnar travel was ill-suited to traveling in the physical world to begin with, but it was also not something he could check for himself, nor could he teach such a spell to Kazue, and it was not part of Moriko's skills.

  The problem was that such spells actually projected the soul while keeping a tether attached to the body. A dungeon's soul did not leave its core, so an avatar attempting to cast a spell to project its soul automatically failed. In a way, an avatar was already a proje of the self, it couldn't create a sed proje. Spells that created temporary duplication of the body were a different matter.

  Once he was doh that, Mordecai turned his attention to ensuring that the dark waters would not leeto the tai cells.

  Finding that some of the wild sewer denizens had enough of a mind and spiritual self to trip the dungeon's revivification safety had been quite a surprise and was a bit of a nuisahe tai cells were much simpler than the prison cells that had beeed for their invaders as Mordecai didn't have to worry about spiteful self-harm or the like.

  The rules about safety and the one-year waiting time applied to these creatures as well, so Mordecai had structed these cells to hold and protedividual oozes and slimes that had bee rge and plex enough to ma a signifit enough sense of self, along with plenty of room to move about.

  Mordecai tried to provide a bit of stimution by varying which ses of the sewers their 'feed' came from. These not-quite-prisoners were a little simple to experience mu the way of boredom, but they were hunter-sgers with enough sense of self to trip Kazue's boon, so they had need of some stimution.

  It had bee one of his best bits of leverage for slowly recruiting them. Weeks of peacefulness with plenty of food and no threats teo be calming, which let Mordecai try again on his offer to help them bee something more. It was still basic, emotional unication in trying to offer the bargain, but it was enough.

  A few of them remained perpetually hostile, however, and the boon required keeping revived creatures safe.

  He could foresee a loop that he didn't particurly like. tain a revived slime for a year, release it into the wild sewers again, and at some ter point have to do it again. As they became more intelligent, they would have more issues with tai, and it would slowly beore problematic to tain a free-willed creature. There was also the question of how long it was going to be between the release and a new revival. On the plus side, the anisms that tripped the boon teo be a lot more dangerous than the ones who didn't, which meant that as long as he kept them spread out enough to not enter each other, they should not enter any other wild creatures that would be hazardous.

  Uh a normal delver, Mordecai couldn't just release them somepce safe on the edge of their territory. Aside from the issue of them not being safe to others, they were not capable of plicated enough thought to uand the boon and be aware of the sequences if they died again inside of the dungeon's territory.

  That was as much as Mordecai felt he should do with the living creatures of the dungeon for now, so he turned his attention to the plicated matter of the materials Satsuki had brought them.

  What almost no oside of dungeons knew, or o know, was the true nature of materials like mithral and adamantine. If one scrutihe strictly physical position of the bits that had mass, the materials were generally not that exotic.

  What made them special was the non-physical pos. The tiny nodules of magical and spiritual energy that took up spad ected the physical pos in a plicated web that had a specific resohat was why mithral and adamaook so much more effort to duplicate than simple metals.

  There were exceptions, but they were the sort that proved the base rule. Crystallized elemental essence was not made up of normal matter, it was densed elemental magic frozen into a physical form that gave it a sort of false mass. It was easier to make a steel alloy taining elemental crystal dust than it was to shape a on out of pure elemental crystal, and this was still very far from normal metal alloys.

  All of this was in trast to what made the materials Satsuki had brought so very, very special.

  The precision of position and structure was no less plicated than the magifused materials, and the metals involved were often rare aic; at least, as metals. Mordecai had never realized that part of the base position for dum gems and emeralds was a metal, yet here it was irihat had been brought over.

  It was even lighter than mithral, but it pared poorly to steel in strength by volume. While it took a bit more force to deform, it failed pletely very shortly after def. In pure form, it was also disturbingly fmmable.

  This 'aluminum', as Satsuki had called it, faired better than steel by weight, but that required increased volume so was a useless metriost applications.

  There were several more metals, such as 'tungsten' and 'titanium', that were also very iing, but shihe most when alloyed. The precision with which they o be bined made them still more costly to create than simple steel and in some cases they were more plicated than mithral, but Mordecai foresaw a lot of opportuo make use of them.

  While he wasn't ready to work directly oures, Mordecai was trying to figure out ways to ie these metals and pounds into shell, bone, and cw. It turned out almost every metal could bih the base anic material of carbon, and most could bih each other or calcium, which was the base of bone and shell. Getting them to do both at the same time was harder.

  Some of his experiments had resulted in immediate and very rapid decay of the material, with corresponding produ of heat and sometimes cussive waves.

  Recreating those experiments in a safe, 'dead' atmosphere did not produce the same results. This was good to know as a data point, but not immediately useful.

  Also, water not only didn't help, but for some experiments it accelerated the process. Non-magical fire that could burn uer was a y that had distracted Mordecai's core for hours until Kazue mentally poked him.

  He was able to show her several new crystals he'd discovered that made her quite pleased. Most of them weren't useful as prems, but they were at least pretty dispy pieces.

  Moriko was happy to be his materials tester. Any alloys he found suitable he either made a on out of for her or made into armor to put on a training dummy.

  Mordecai politely deed her offer for him to be said training dummy. He loved sparring with her, he had no iion of just standing there being hit, no matter how dramatically she pouted at him. When she was doh her game, she gave him a kiss and ran off to py with her oys.

  While they could add items made out of these metals to earlier zohe three of them talked about it and decided to introduce the new metals slowly, starting with this o zone.

  Of course, no matter how many experiments he performed and creations he made, Mordecai couldn't know for sure how they'd behave ohe materials were fully real.

  The ma aside to make rewards became fully real material only wheems were cimed by delvers.

  Simirly, the mana for their inhabitant's bodies became fully real immediately, but with the caveat that some of their abilities were powered by the core, just as the boween their souls and the ade it possible to actively retrieve their bodies and relocate them.

  Internal avatars were more like his experiments: very detailed mana structs running simutions of physical builds. It was the fully ied avatars like Kazue's that were pletely real.

  But there were only a few days to py with everything before the midwinter solstice. Mordecai carefully made sure to unmake his experiments the night before the three-day celebration for the twin goddesses began.

  Zagaroth