According to my teacher there will be nothing left for him to teach me after tomorrow. From there I will know everything he knows about the soul, though I still lack the centuries of practice he has had. I will likely be working on that last bit until my soul is destroyed, or at least my memories.

I have so many things I want to try out with the soul, most of them require a kind of delicate work I’m not yet confident in doing. I’m better of sticking to simple and small scale things that I can easily do without risk of failure and that I can scale up massively. That is likely the best way to leverage my hivemind. Better thousands of perfectly made weak connections than one strong but flawed connection.

My students, my numerous students, are mostly quick learners. The ones from the older dungeon are all very good at taking advantage of the kind of teaching I’m using, and they represent a bit more than a third of the people around here, while almost all of the rest already had some skill and most people have evolved into something with some natural talent relating to plants by sheer virtue of how much attention the hand of the world pays to me and my surroundings. I expect people to be getting to the point that I can no longer teach them within the week, and I expect people that I deem worthy of joining my paladins to be good enough even before that.

Not everyone is talented, however. Several people have no skill or talent with plants, many of them have already dropped out. There is one kid, however, that has absolutely abysmal talent, but they have more potential to join my paladins than anyone else here.

Naturally, seeing as they have so much potential I decided to pay them extra attention. They seem to have really good memories of their past life, not quite as good as Askos but coming relatively close. They came from some war-torn land where life for them was miserable, ultimately they died young and were reincarnated into a happy family in this world, though a different continent. His home was attacked by a group of soldiers and his family had to flee as refugees to my forest, his father killed and his mother severely wounded in the process.

He found himself in what seemed to be a utopia, where petty things like grievous bodily harm were fixed with ease and no one had to go hungry because there wasn’t enough food. Seeing the kid’s memories of wonder at the home I built melted my heart a little. After that was a cascade of small and large events that made him believe that I was a goddess with every fiber of his being and that as long as he worked for my benefit life would be good. I intend to prove him right. I really want him to succeed, despite his lack of talent.

It also explains his species, not many Elves in this part of the world. Or bipeds in general for that matter. Mostly just draconics, beasts, and monsters, though more recently there has been an explosion in the population of clockworks and plants on the continent.

Since Whisperer’s replacement’s death, whom I learned to be called ‘Speaker’, which I was not expecting, that whole organization has fallen into shambles. There are a lot of people trying to replace Speaker, going to some uncomfortable extremes to do so. I really don’t like this dissonance, especially with what I have learned about the soul. I really don’t want something like this becoming a part of our culture, so I have to do something about it. I made an announcement saying that I would sort everything out in the coming days, but I have no idea how to do that. I’ll try to come up with something tomorrow.

Other than that I spent time with Azrezel. He’s actually been working with Tiddol a lot recently, mostly making part undead part clockwork creatures similar to the state Tiddol is in, hopefully, so that they can understand her situation better. I ended up helping them out a bit, though the progress was minimal. We made quite a lot of them, but we weren’t able to figure out how to get everything to function together nearly as well as Tiddol did. The standard control scheme for a flesh and bone body just doesn’t map to clockwork at all, even replacing the brain with clockwork doesn’t help as then all we have in a braindead zombie. Tiddol doesn’t really understand how she did it either, it’s pure intuition for her working on her own body, but working on other partial clockwork creatures she draws a blank. I’m sure we can figure out what’s going on here with enough effort, and maybe a little Fate. Assuming it takes long enough for me to build up a big enough amount as assuming it behaves as I want it too.

I also offered Tiddol something to help her with her multitasking issue, but she said that she wanted to fix it herself.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.