We got a message back from my dad today, the dungeon was willing to cooperate. According to the message they have taken quite a beating recently, but the walls are holding. They are more or less good on resources, but the enemy seems to be trying to deprive us of as many people as they can. They aren't trying to starve us out they are trying to slaughter us to the last.

It makes sense, people really is the only resource we have a finite amount of. I can only produce Ents so quickly, and as versetile, as undead are, they either aren't as useful as a well-trained soldier or way too expensive to be produced in mass. On the other hand, as long as we have people it is easy to turn them into what we need, we can easily create soldiers or craftsmen or anything else. And we have no shortages of food or metal or healing or anything else you might need to power an army. Just a shortage of people.

And the problem is I have no idea how to fix that. Yeah, healing helps a lot, but you can't fix death. At least not without the soul. I could try to replicate whatever it is that happened to Tiddol, but I'm not willing to experiment with that on myself and it's a line I'm not willing to cross with other people.

Although, for some reason the souls of my Paladins tend to stick around even after death. I've had a number of them die, but their souls are still there, and their knowledge is still useable. I could theoretically bring them back to life at a negligible cost to myself. I've done it with Ents that have died in my forest, but that was relying on a mechanism that is part of my dungeon core. It doesn't take any effort for that on my part, but I can't rely on that to revive my Paladins.

I know how to do it, it isn't exactly complicated. It is very similar to seeding a soul, only instead of splitting a piece of your own soul off you just plant a new soul entirely into the body. I am almost certain that I can do it, but I'm not certain that I can do it in the first shot. And messing up here would mutilate the soul I'm working with. So I need to practice somehow.

This means I need to try and create an artificial soul, which will take a lot of practice but doesn't matter nearly as much if I fail. Of course, I still have a couple books I want to finish, and I would really rather avoid abandoning a task right in the middle again. This isn't an urgent issue, it would currently only get us another hundred or so people. A hundred or so incredibly skilled people, mind you, but still only a hundred. And I don't exactly have the resources to dramatically expand my Paladins. The connections between them are incredibly strong, which means that I need to spend progressively more soul energy to add each new Paladin.

I could also try improving the design of the Ents, but that won't increase the rate at which I am able to make more of them. I could teach my ents how to artificially create more of themselves, but none of them have the soul energy required to actually seed a soul. Undead, sure, but not anything else.

In the end, I think that I am going to leave this issue to others to solve. I'll do what I can to alleviate it but I can't do more than that.

Anyway, Good Night Diary.