Several kilometers away from the city, with its walls, towers, and castle, a shallow canyon slices through the mesa everything is stacked upon. After so much erosion, it’s not even technically accurate to call the two raised bits of land a single mesa any longer, but people refuse to accept changes occur. That may in fact be a contributing factor as to why the city in general uses the canyon and river therein as a dumping ground for all of their unwanted waste. Enough fill would erase any hole, the reasoning would go, and as long as efforts are underway to make it a reality, the two mesas would be one.

Not that a necromancer pushing junk out of a cart down a cliff cared about why there weren’t actual landfills or garbage dumps anywhere to be found. For them, it was just a part of the daily routine, and how garbage had always been disposed of. Somehow, the daily droppage of magical materials into the ecosystem down below hadn’t resulted in a blighted wasteland; it had instead resulted in a slime infested one. The water-based sacks of gelatin divided fast enough that any particular contaminant that fell in would in short order be engulfed by one of the monsters, at which point it had three gallons of water to diffuse itself into. Any hazardous material unable to be contained by this set off the slime’s ‘protect the group’ instincts, wherein the slime in question would notice it was going to die, start shedding off droplets of contaminants, and, if failure still loomed, throw itself into the river.

Diffusing particularly strong malefics would occasionally cause a slime chain reaction, as unaffected blobs roll over the cast off droplets and go into the panic mode themselves. Eventually, all of the material ends up in the river, at which point it is no longer a problem of the city. There are always more slimes, and rarely does anyone care about anyone who happens to live downstream from them.

Adventurers, on the other hand, find the base of the canyon to be a good starting point for training purposes. Every evening, the public garbage collectors take their collections over the edge, and what slimes managed to survive the day come to feast on the completely mundane waste of a city. Food overflow, biological waste products, remnants of crafting processes, all of it serves to fuel the growth of the scavengers down below. Each one devours all it can, renders it down into mana, and divides into as many copies of itself as possible to consume more. Apparently, in this particular environment that is the evolutionary strategy for success. By daybreak, the riverbed is full of slimes, just waiting to be slaughtered en mass by people looking to get a little extra power and pocket change.

Metals and gems aren’t broken down easily by slimes. With a bit of luck, the average stick-swinger would be able to gather a significant mass of scrap metal from beating down a pile of harmless jelly over the course of a workday, as long as they manage to pick up the spoils with enough haste. Unfortunately for the slimes, the main dangers they pose to even a novice adventurer is the possibility of another slime consuming what the person beating on them is trying to get out of them, and wasting enough time that the adventurer is buried in garbage at the end of the day. It’s fairly rare someone is unobservant enough to be killed in that manner though.

A lesser danger, but one worth noting, would be a potential mutation of the slimes after a Wizard Tower dump. Magical material, being mainly mana, may manifest malignancies in the typically genial and bouncy slimes. A cartload of corpses and reagents would simply lead to an increased rate of division, as the energy provided is similar enough to that provided by ordinary materials that is can be processed by their simple biology in the same manner, but were it to contain something uniquely magical, an enchanted weapon or necklace made of compressed fire for example, it might transform into a more powerful variant of the slime species. Metal slimes, when they appear in the area, are highly sought for their valuable materials.

Careful mages would be sure to pick through their collection before dumping, however. Magic is expensive, and additional work to maybe recoup the loss of what would have been theirs had they paid more attention is not an attractive prospect to a wizard, regardless of financial status. A necromancer that lives above a shop with their parents would be doubly so focused, as any amount they could scavenge would put them one step closer to an actual space in the tower.

Scavenged books, for instance, would potentially allow any wizard to bypass ordinary requirements to figure out spells the long way, or give inspiration regarding a project one might use to show them all what they were capable of. The necromancer that had just finished putting the cart back into its stall didn’t know what exactly was going to be in that book they had pilfered, but, considering how expensive textbooks were, it was a steal at the price they had gotten it at. They walk straight through the shop, ignoring the various bobs and ends on display, and take the stairs two at a time, hoping to get to their room before -

“Avery, is that you?”

With a sigh, the necromancer stops halfway up the stairs and turns around.

“Yeah mom. Just got back.”

“Oh good! Could you come here and help with something?”

The necromancer takes one last look up the stairs, considering if it was worth the effort to go all the way up there to take off their robes if they were going to have to come all the way back down again, and forlornly trudges back down. So close to getting to dig into a book…

Behind a curtain draped down over a doorway, hanging off a wooden rod, a fair woman with curly brown hair stands in front of a stove. Sitting atop it is a pot, full of unidentifiable lumps and boiling water. As the necromancer walks in, pushing the curtain out of the way, the woman shoves a large wooden spoon at them.

“Stir this for me. My arms are tired.”