I have decided to spend half of my time teaching people and half of my time trying to figure out how to make something that would teach people in the future.

A couple more people are ready to join my Paladins, and more have learned everything I can teach. The elf kid is doing well, really well actually. Under my direct guidance, they are thriving in a way that the vast majority of the other students simply aren’t, I expect great things from them. They are actually progressing slower than most of the others, but when you consider their lack of talent for the subject it’s impressive.

As for creating memories, I’m not very good at it yet. I am able to do it, but I fail more often than not. Which is more or less what I expected. I can maybe redesign the structure to be less complicated, which would do wonders for my ability to actually create it, but there would be several downsides with that. The most obvious is the fact that it would use up a lot more soul energy to create, as everything would be much more spread out. The second is that it would be more fragile, which means even more soul energy to reinforce the shell of the soul. It is possible to do it in a way that is both simple enough for me to do while also being durable, but they take much more soul energy than I have access to so it’s a moot point. Besides, even if I fail it is good practice for bigger and better things.

One of those bigger and better things involves expanding and improving my hivemind a little. I want to try and connect the souls of the members to myself and to each other, which should have a number of effects, the most important of which is an increased amount of control over the information and emotions that reach me from my hivemind. Really the other things are irrelevant when compared to that, but there are other things. It should make it easier to share information through the hivemind, which isn’t really necessary currently but still potentially useful. Plus if I do it right I can increase the amount of mental prowess each individual has while also dramatically expanding and improving my own soul, or at least the shell. Any improvements to the core is going to take a lot more control than I have.

There are a couple downsides, the most noteworthy being that it is going to take a little while before I’m at a point where I can reasonably do this. I’ve tested it a bit on a small scale and it’s just out of reach of my current skills, I imagine that doing it on a scale like this would make it harder. At the same time, it is going to cost a lot of soul energy, easily an order of magnitude more than I have available to me currently. That isn’t too bad as my soul is still rapidly improving thanks to the exercises I’m doing, but it will still be quite a while before I’m able to pull it off. Although, if I do it in smaller increments I might be able to get away with using less energy at a time, that way I could do it much sooner and not have to worry about exhausting or hurting myself.

I should see about trying to learn other subjects in the same way I learned about the soul, though I doubt anything will come of it. Very few people are capable of communicating like that, most of them being really old dungeons.

Other than that I spent my downtime with Jasmine, as she was in town again today. She complained about not being able to join my hivemind because the benefits would be super useful for her, apparently doing so would get in the way of the whole ‘preventing people from learning how to use nuclear fire’ thing. That actually spawned a rather interesting discussion about telepathy and other similar things. Apparently, one of the first things they teach newcomers who somehow managed to figure things out on their own is how to shield their minds from telepathy, which makes sense. They also do things like teaching them how to turn off pain or how to remove toxins from the body quickly, apparently so much as a slip of the tongue is enough to let some people figure out how to use nuclear fire, while truth serums and torture have been used on several occasions in the past to get their secrets. At the end of their training, they are all forced into contracts similar to the one I have with the older dungeon preventing them from revealing their secrets without permission from the others. They really take this censorship seriously, it’s kind of ridiculous actually. I can see how damaging it can be, but this is a level beyond what I was expecting.

As a side note, every single nuclear fire user is a somewhat competent healer or undead. You kind of have to be in order to do things like turn off pain.

Anyway, Good Night Diary