During the day after their arrival at what can only be called a temple now, the Marms continued to pray or to study the murals. While the few children able to play around, wander and explore the rooms, trying again and again to open the closed door. Others are installing camp for the night and preparing offerings.

To my pleasure, some of the youngs arm themselves with sticks and make their best to reproduce the katas on the walls. Unfortunately, it does not last long as the priestess needs silence to study.

After almost a full day, she finally comes to the conclusion that either the love between the Goddess and the God is a question of balance between two antagonistic emotions, that the love of the Goddess was so strong that it reached through the violent nature of the God and touched him.

I think she will still need a bit of time to develop a convincing explanation and link it to her few sacred texts. To be frank, I don’t really care, in a few generations - if I’m still alive - all of them will be mine.

At the end of the day, the Marms gather once more for an evening service. During this service, they bring gifts and deposit them around the foot of the pedestal holding the mana crystal. Food in the form of fruits and trinkets made of wood, bones or metal. Nothing interesting to me in there. But since I am a benevolent Goddess I accept the offerings and, hiding it behind a bright glow, I absorb them.

The Marms are obviously pleased by my acceptance of their gifts and are cheering. If I keep accepting their offerings, maybe one day they’ll be find a way to make an interesting one. I’ll have to guide them to what I want.

Throughout the day, on the other side of my island, the inhabitants of the town have continued their usual activities. Nothing particularly interesting there. No one will attain Citizenship overnight. The same thing is true for my experiment on hybridization, the result will appear soon, but not tonight.

Therefore I turn my attention to my prisoner. It is time to proceed with my plan to forcefully claim him.

The first step is to injure Bertrand more as to decrease furthermore his already weak protective bubble of mana. I could use animals for that, but I want to try something else. Something that would spare my creatures the risk and be more effective. I prepare an iron barbed spear under Bertrand’s actual position. I may not be able to directly alter or create things too close to him, because of the mana bubble’s interferences, but I can throw things at him and that will do. I guess that’s an hint on how dungeons’ traps work.

When the iron spear is ready to be launched, I push it through the stone floor right into Bertrand’s right foot. The spear impales it, nailing him to the ground.

“AAAAAAARRRGGGHHH!!!!!!” He screams in pain, which is a pretty normal reaction when your feet is suddenly stabbed by a foreign object from underground. I take a bit of time enjoying the tasty waves of mana Bertrand is emitting before going back to my work.

While Bertrand is trying in panic to remove the spear from his foot the barbs are preventing him from doing so, they are even inflicting more damage to his foot, providing me with more tasty mana, I focus my mind on looking at his bubble. I can’t let my mind enjoy the pain mana for too long, or Bertrand could bleed to death. It would certainly be a tasty feeling, but would ruin the experiment. Fortunately, as I hoped, the bubble is visibly weakened, particularly around his right foot, but not enough for me to easily pour my mana through it.

I start the second part of the claiming process. I gather a great amount of mana in a single point of Bertrand’s cell and shape it in a small arrowhead. I then make it rotate to create a drill. The thing is emanating a bit of light and when Bertrand sees it, his screams of pain and fear grow even worse.

Making this drill reminds me of the time I pushed through the barrier in my mountain allowing me to claim some mana crystals.

When the mana drill is ready I slowly press it against Bertrand’s bubble. He tries to flee, but his foot is still nailed to the ground, giving me an immobile target. Slowly the passive protection of Bertrand is deforming around his foot, as I continuously press the drill against the bubble, a spiral pattern appears on the bubble’s surface and thinning and deforming it more and more.

Bertrand may not understand what I’m doing to him, but one way or another he is trying to resist. It is probably an unconscious reaction provoked by fear and pain, but he is strengthening his bubble’s membrane. Unfortunately for him, he is not able to do it fast enough.

After two hours of this, during which Bertrand has grown weaker and weaker due to physical and mental exhaustion as well as simple blood loss, I can see that the bubble is barely thicker than those of an animal.

I give the mana drill one last push to shatter Bertrand's mana bubble. There is a last scream coming out of his throat as his body relaxes and just lays unmoving on the ground.

I focus my mind on him and find that I effectively claimed him. But I can’t find the presence of his mind. Unlike Franziska who can ‘talk’ with me in her mind or the Marm baby and his rudimentary mind, Bertrand’s mind is completely blank. It is not even at the level of a simple bug. His heart is still beating and his respiratory system seems to work automatically, but that’s all.

I think that forcibly claiming him has destroyed his mind, only the autonomous bodily functions seem to remain.

I wanted to claim another sapient being to use as an experimental subject for the several experiments I have in mind. I was also expecting to have to fight against his will, again and again, to force him to participate in each of my experiments and have to suffer his constant presence in the back of my mind. But now I have a mindless drone.

This might even be better. He may not have an independent will anymore, allowing him to serve me to the best of his capacity like I would have preferred. But since he would have never been a loyal and devoted servant and would have remained a liability if I didn’t take care of him, I am glad to have him like this.

His body is the part I’m most interested in after all. For my future experiments and for other uses I can easily take control of his mindless body. A body that is not yet powerful enough for all of my needs. I have to prepare it to come to my defence in time of need.

The first thing I do, after I’m certain that the body is fully mine, is to heal it and to dissipate the spear holding it down. It is better to have it in good health rather than having it badly injured. After that, I leave the body laying on the ground and circulate my mana through it, as if it was meditating. It is a strange feeling to have control over a body that has no mind inside, not even the barest hints of instinct. Usually, when I take control of an animal, I don’t need to consciously move every part of the body as its mind is taking care of making it move flawlessly. But here, with Bertrand’s former body, I have to take attention to contract each and every muscle when I want the body to move. I have to learn how to make it move, just like children have to learn how to walk.

While the body is meditating, I start to build a new facility. It is a simple one and its goal is to serve as the living quarters for the body. I install a rudimentary bed for it to sleep on, a place to cook and eat and a place for it to clean itself. I think I could make the body live only from absorbing my mana, but I don’t want to take the risk of it losing strength, so I will have it eat heavily mana charged meat and fruits from my Domain to provide the body with physical sustenance. Also, having it cook its own meals will serve as a good exercise for me to sharpen my control over the body.

Next to the living quarters for the body, I create a training ground where I will have it practice the use of weapons, while also making it gain more and better muscles. I create a full body armor out of the strongest alloy of metal I can make, as well as a bunch of weapons. The alloy is not perfect as I am quite lacking in blacksmithing knowledge, I know a lot of different weapons, but I do not know how to really forge them. I can only make them grow out of nowhere, directly in their final form, but this production method is not as good as the work of a good blacksmith. Maybe it is time to give Franziska the smithy I promised her?

The daily schedule of the body is quite simple. I make it practice with the weapons and the armor to get use to them in every condition and to keep it fit. When the body is tired, it washes itself, cooks, and eats its meal, then it meditates. Bertrand only had an average potential for meditation, but I will sublime the inherent abilities of his body and make it a powerful tool for my needs.

Of course, the schedule of the body will sometimes be perturbed by my needs to have it participate in one experiment or another. But the first of them will have to wait, as I want to see the result of the hybridization between the squirrel and the bat, before I start new experiments.

Speaking of which, something is happening there. The mother squirrel bearing the child of a bat is not at the best of her health. It is normal for a pregnant mammal to be more tired than usual, but here I can sense that there is more.

I closely inspect the squirrel to see what is happening. I can’t find anything wrong, except for the fact that the child is drawing more energy from its mother than in normal squirrel or bat pregnancies. But that does not mean there is nothing else. For precaution, I at least directly infuse some mana into the mother to heal her and support her during the time of my experimentation.

After that, I go on infusing mana into animals who are on the verge of the small evolution they can do. I also claim the several flying and swimming creatures that entered my Domain. It is something I do regularly as it is common that new birds or fishes enter my claimed area.

After claiming those animals I usually let them leave the area with an order to come back once a week. This way I can map the area around my island outside of the boundaries of my Domain. It also allows me to learn about the habits of the boats passing through the region, not that there are a lot of them.

The closest land to the Maria island in the Joqua archipelago is at half a day for a flying seagull, counting the time the bird stops to eat fish. If the seagull flies straight to the other island, it would only need one hour to reach it. And the few boats I have ever seen have never ventured farther than that island. The passing of my birds over the archipelago as allowed me to determine that those islands are also inhabited by Marms communities.

It seems that those communities were not attacked by the pirates as they are more often visited by merchants, even if it’s not interesting enough for them to do so frequently.

Anyway, it means that I have the place to grow and that I can do so without fearing to be discovered soon by someone else than the pirates who already came and whoever they will leak the information about me to.

This place allows me to make a formidable amount of natural defences, if I have the time do so before the pirates come back. And it will also allow me to go on with some of my plans in the far future because I do not intend to stay secluded on my tiny island.

I have big ambitions for my corner of the world.