Today my apprentices made progress towards completing this current exercise, but nothing out of the ordinary or unexpected happened with them. They are progressing at pretty much the rate I predicted that they would, Junior should have mastered it within a day, Askos within two. From there I will probably make them heal while some kind of poison is actively preventing them from doing so, it should be easy enough to make with Whitefoot.

So I finally managed to get a Digger Root to evolve into a plant capable of manipulating metal the way its predecessor was able to manipulate dirt and rocks. No Idea what I am going to call it yet, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

I ended up pulling it off shortly before lunchtime. I had gotten it to the point that Digger Root could manipulate anything short of pure metal before it finally made the leap to manipulating the metal instead of the impurities, which wasn’t too surprising.

I just hope people put it to use.

My next project is going to be designing an object that projects an ever-changing anti-magic field around itself without outside input. The inspiration for this project comes from the current exercise my apprentices are undergoing, of course. I figure it might be useful to train under, and even if it isn’t Par would be able to make use of it in hunting down enemy mages. So I need to make it as overwhelmingly powerful as I possibly can, and have it change itself as often as possible to keep enemy mages from learning how to resist the stuff.

Plus there is the whole benefit of being able to make use of it better in my own presence. I’ll probably need to figure out how to properly resist the stuff myself soon.

I can probably do a lot better with this than I did with the one I built for my apprentices. I spent maybe a minute designing it so it is far from perfect, but it was more than good enough for what I needed. Plus I can cut down a lot of the design if I personally power and control it.

The one that I am going to be designing now needs to be able to power and run itself, as powering Null is actually really expensive. It costs way more mana that it actually should because it is affected by itself and isn’t really able to learn and improve, or rather it is, but on a very large time scale. It would take longer than I have been alive for any noticeable difference to occur.

Or maybe not. What if I make it smart? It would make the whole constant flux thing a lot easier without causing it to end up being predictable. Something to look into when I actually start this project.

Other than that I spent my downtime with Azrezel, who now has several dozen truly intelligent undead under his control. A couple of them have memories of a past life and one of them was even a mage, though in his memories he had access to maybe a tenth of the current ambient mana level. It does give him an advantage, and he had been a mage for nearly two centuries before dying, but the lack of mana makes it difficult to improve. As a result, he matches the best of our own mages while falling short of the likes of Azrezel and myself.

Azrezel himself has recently been hunting for powerful corpses, when mass producing undead the ones we make through flesh manipulation are just fine, but if you want something really good then you need to work with better base materials. He has been buying up any powerful corpses he can and has even hired a group of adventurers to hunt down powerful creatures and bring him their corpses, the specific creatures they hunt down are of his own choosing, many of them being prominent people in the angelic council. I personally hope they pull those ones off.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.