I spent my time experimenting with the small sample of sand today. I found that the strength of the poison dropped off significantly with distance, to the point that I was comfortable with working in the room personally. Huge mistake, as after a while my own constant healing was no longer enough to keep up and I had to flee. It isn’t an exaggeration to say I almost died, this stuff is dangerous and I got too confident.

When I tried to figure out why I ended up poisoned I discovered that the room had very little mana in it, something I failed to notice during my experimentation. It seems like ambient mana also blocks this poison, which was the first real lead I had gotten all day. All of the mana had gone into the walls, because I had designed the walls to store as much mana as possible.

This was an easy fix, I basically just changed the walls to move all of the mana into the room, and then poured out tons of my own mana into the room. Once there was enough mana in there that I was satisfied I got back to work.

Whatever this poison is it seems to repel mana, though different from how I’ve seen solar energy do that. It seems to basically throw itself outwards at all angles and physically pushes back against mana until it is inevitably consumed by the ambient mana. Which would explain how it makes people sick. It also seems to be another form of energy, like mana or Solar Energy.

And then I kind of stalled again for a while. Teleporting the stuff didn’t seem to do anything, light and sound were similarly useless, locking the stuff in an enclosed box and making the insides blow up a couple times only turned the sand into a much finer powder. Burning the stuff didn’t seem to do anything, as did using air or water on it.

It wasn’t until I decided to separate each grain of the powdered sand individually based on what they felt most similar to with Digger Root that I had a breakthrough. A couple small piles of what was once part of the sand were very obviously the source of the poisonous energy. The rest of the stuff was just normal sand.

This means that there is at least one way to reliably destroy this poison, brute force annihilation. If I overload it with enough mana I can cause the whole thing to be destroyed by mana toxicity. I definitely don’t have the skills required to destroy this type of thing another way. Healing would be useless and I don’t have any relevant plants, nor are any relevant plants for sale. And I highly doubt I would be able to create a plant that is capable of interacting with a new form of energy like this. Even if I could I don’t want to because I am worried I am going to kill myself with this stuff despite taking as many precautions as I can. I understand why the people that know how to use it don’t want anyone else using it.

This led to another round of testing where I figured out the specifics of how it interacted with mana by watching it as it interacted with increasingly larger amounts of the stuff. I was unable to get the mana density high enough that it could destroy the whole pile of the stuff without also risking both my own life and the integrity of the building. But I was able to destroy a very small amount, and I was ultimately able to destroy all of it by spreading out in the room. Whatever it is made out of is hardly on the level of magical metal, and is incredibly fragile to mana. It only survives because the energy it radiates pushes mana away from it.

The problem would solve itself, in a millennia or so. I don’t want to wait that long.

And that is where I stopped for the day, I’ll start working on how to actually go about fixing this issue tomorrow.

The dungeons managed to find something in whatever it was that they were looking for that validates my entire line of thought regarding why I can’t use necromancy. Apparently, there was a change to the way the world worked that happened well before there was enough ambient mana for the Origin to start appearing. There was a ton of stuff there, some of it describing how evolution worked, a lot of that having been changed by Origin later, some of it describing how the suns and the moons would orbit the world, also changed later by Origin, and a bunch of other stuff that isn’t interesting in and of itself but has connotations that I would rather not think about at this exact second.

In there were restrictions governing necromancy, and no other form of magic. In those restrictions was everything we had observed, the lack of an ability to use healing and the imperfect connection of souls to undead bodies, among others that the dungeons had found. In addition were a couple things we hadn’t thought of, like something describing how the Origin would fly into a rage at the sight of the undead or Necromancy in general, there was nothing else anywhere describing the Origin, and a bit about how the souls of Necromancers would heal slower than they normally would.

The dungeons took it to a vote and they all collectively agreed to remove those restrictions entirely, and then the vast majority of them promptly stopped caring about necromancy again. Everyone agreed that the group that found those restrictions were the ones that deserved the reward I offered, though not everyone was happy about it. Now I’m just waiting to hear from them about what exactly they want. I personally hope they want an Ent, then I don’t have to ask Tiddol for a favor.

I spent my downtime with Azrezel, who is a bit miffed that he still has to fix the souls of the undead he already has if he wants them to be smart. Apparently, he finds soul magic to be rather boring. He is also a bit bummed by this conclusion to his quest to create intelligent undead. Yes, he did technically succeed on his own, albeit in a limited fashion, but any undead he creates from now on, assuming the physical body is good enough, will be an intelligent undead. That is the same for every other somewhat experienced necromancer in the world. It did cheer him up quite a bit when I pointed out that he did help quite a bit in getting everything to a point where it can happen, he inadvertently not only helped allow himself to create intelligent undead but also everyone else as well. In addition to that, he helped prevent similar attacks to what happened on his dad from happening.

We ended up spending some time teaching each other how to do necromancy and healing, respectively. Though we were primarily focused on teaching him healing as healing is more useful to him than necromancy is to me. Plus I have the advantage of Grey Iris, which is a significant help with necromancy.

Ultimately I taught him a bit about how to shape flesh and mold bone, which is similar to how he did it through his limited abilities as a necromancer, but better as it lacks the restrictions the necrotic version had. He can learn traditional healing from any old healer, there aren’t very many flesh manipulators and the only one he has access to is myself.

It’s been a while since I have actually taught anyone, it’s fun. I’ll probably spend my downtime with Azrezel helping him learn.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.