Avery had one thousand eight hundred and thirteen mana remaining in her gem, and a maximum capacity of eight thousand five hundred. The slime remains she had deconstructed had supplied her with twenty five mana. In order to fill up to maximum, she would need to lure two hundred and seventy or so slimes up to the dungeon, which she was happy to call it now that she had a simple maze of rooms, and render them down into jelly and delicious mana within the two hours she had her body. Slimes were weak, but that might be a bit difficult to do on her lonesome.

As such, she needed to formulate a plan. If Avery could gain mana from having creatures in her dungeon, she might be able to solve the deficit problem by simply dumping a pile of slimes into a pit and using them as free mana per hour boosters. Since she had a convenient pit already dug out one room farther in, she might as well test the possibility of keeping a single slime trapped inside of it before instantly committing to filling her entire floor plan to the brim with the green gloop. Luring one slime was easy enough, but almost three hundred might be a bit problematic.

The necromancer’s first thought was to utilize some of the adventurers that clear out the canyon regularly for fun and slight profit, but she dismissed that notion almost immediately. There was a bowling ball sized chunk of textured black gemstone resting in this place, and Avery was one hundred percent sure that anyone who laid eyes on the jewel would be overcome with desire. If there was one thing people could be sure of when dealing with adventurers, it was that they would try to take anything that wasn’t both nailed down and on fire. If they had a crowbar and were strong enough, even that wouldn’t deter them. Things didn’t count as nailed down if you could pry them up.

Avery was going to need a storage place for her core. Clearly, the first room right in the middle of everything wasn’t going to cut it. She did have three points in the dungeon where the path branched though, and could move the core fairly freely when she had access to her body again. That was another possible thing to do. Scout out the area for things to deconstruct. On most days there would be plenty of junk at the bottom of the canyon, so she could grab a few interesting items while she brought back the slime she would be trapping in the pit. Unfortunately, Avery wouldn’t be able to just switch from her core to her body and back again constantly while the spell was in effect, or she’d be able to bring things up, deconstruct them, check the effect, and go back down for more without having to potentially waste time on experiments that weren’t going to bear fruit.

Even in its unsimplified state, this particular spell was designed to end when the caster reentered their primary body. Why it had allowed her to go back to her regular body after returning to the core if it reassigned her primary to the gem wasn’t entirely clear, though the spell might have been assigning priority to the body that cast the spell until it ran out of duration, but when she cast the simplified version from the gem as a source point she would be unable to lean on any such technicality of magic to get more use out of the spell. At least she could hang on for two hours if she didn’t cut the effect off early.

Deciding to start on a smaller objective first, Avery finishes the spell and sends her soul to inhabit her original body. The pain from having a stone ceiling dropped on her hits her as soon as she makes it in, and she is knocked unconscious.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Down the opposite stream as the Mage of Magic from the mesa, Ham Kodave enters a novice leveled dungeon. He’d show them all that it didn’t take smarts to be good at magic. Those snob wizards and their standardized testing, there were other ways to do magic than memorizing books and whatever it was nerds did. Probably math. Ham didn’t need to do that. He was born of death, and when the doctors had ripped him from the flesh of his zombified mother, it followed into his soul. The church of darkness that raised him, and had raised his mother in another since, wanted him to join their number as a priest, but that was a path that led to selflessly helping others at the expense of the helper. That was not anywhere near a thing Ham was interested in. No, his interests lay closer to what was within him since birth. The raw necromancy.

Death drew to itself more death. That was the truth of the world, and Ham would bring it to himself to grow in power. This cold passage of stone would serve to feed into him, and beckon forth entropy itself to punish the wizards that declared him too stupid to learn necromancy. Fifty points should have been more than enough!

Six meters down the dungeon’s first corridor, there was a branch to the right. It looked like a dead end though, so he ignored it. Four steps further, and the path turned to the right, just like the dead end had. So far, a straight shot without branching paths worth mentioning, nothing to worry about at all. On the right, an alcove was carved into the masonry of the walls, holding within it a statue with a demonic visage, eyes of ruby glittering in the dim, flickering light of the candles lit in six meter intervals all down the halls, all on the left side of the dungeon as one would be entering it. That subtlety was lost on Ham, and he continues walking down the corridor until it turns to the left twenty meters further, thinking about how to rip the rubies from the idol as he leaves the dungeon the whole time.

Twelve meters down the next hall, halfway down, Ham is suddenly interrupted by a scythe blade sweeping across the hall at waist level. It rends a deep gash into his side, revealing the organs contained within his torso, and buries itself into the wall on the opposite end of Ham from where it started. An observant person would notice and handhold on the side of the blade, for a monster or other resident to the dungeon to grab onto and pull the back around to spring out once more, but Ham had another thing on his mind.

Pale from the damage rent from his frame, he brings forth the energy of undeath into his right hand, and presses that hand into the torn flesh of his side. If he was as fleshy and weak as the wizards who sat indoors and played at theories all day, that single trap would have left him laying on the ground bleeding to death slowly, consciousness faded away as death inevitably came to strip his strength and feed it to the dungeon and its monsters. No, Ham’s scrawniness was more toward that of an animated skeleton, where cutting and stabbing would be hard-pressed to do damage to the solid bones, rather than that brought about by raw malnutrition. Absorbing the energy of death he could channel without end, Ham brought his flesh back together into one piece.

There was a lot of dungeon to go, and the dread necromancer was ready to take everything that was this place and subsume it into his power.