“What do you mean you can’t read it? I made that perfectly legible.”

Avery didn’t have time for that kind of nonsense. She had worked quite hard for several minutes trying to get the holes to look like letters. Time trying to remake the thing would be time spent away from making puzzles, and she wanted to get a numbering system made out of symbols established. Star, sun, crescent moon, misshapen blob, key, puzzle piece, sword, shield, skull; nine signs symbolizing a few things relevant to the world and this dungeon in particular. She’d need to engrave a wall somewhere with the code, and probably embed some clues in it to some of the puzzles.

“It’s nothing to do with your… Penmanship. It’s more the fact that I don’t actually speak your language, and the cheat I’m using doesn’t work with written words.”

Well. Hrm. That was actually a fairly viable excuse. Avery didn’t know the comprehend languages spell off the top of her head, and didn’t even have it written down anywhere to cast from, but she was aware of the theory behind it. Generally it would allow the caster to understand and read the language of whatever they touched while casting the spell, but not speak in the tongue. There was a far more complex spell that did both, and for all languages at once, but in theory a magical researcher could pare down the ‘tongues’ spell to a single language and it would have the effect described, understanding and speaking a single language while being unable to read it. With that kind of inherent spell-like ability, theoretically this invader would be an ideal diplomat, being able to bridge the communication gap between various races, even the uncivilized monsters who only spoke their own language without learning the common tongue. Being unable to read would even be a benefit, if one were to use them as couriers. Only uncivilized barbarians were unable to decipher texts, but such were most unsuited to the work of transporting sensitive materials without ruining the parchment with tearing, blood, or general bad hygiene.

“Fine, you don’t need to read the message anyway. I’ll just tell you how to get there.”

“Great. Do you have a pen so I can write down the directions?”

Avery paused for a moment.

“No. Pay attention.”

“Fine.”

“Go toward the city, enter the gate. Straight down the main road, there’ll be a tavern with a picture of an ale mug with a skull on it on the right. Ignore that, and keep going until there’s a bakery on the left. Take a right there, and down about three streets there’ll be a shop with a sign that had a beefy arm and a wand shooting squiggles at it. That’s my family’s magic arms store. The gems will be in a storeroom to the left behind the counter, and my parents will be the ones that look like me.”

“And to confirm, you’re the dead body on the floor, right?”

“I’m not dead!”

“Got it. The not dead body on the floor.”

“Yes, that’s me. When you get back, I’ll have a room for you straight through this tunnel, and not even a haunted one. Definitely.”

“Oh hey, that actually sounds both nice and useful. I guess we’re getting to be friends now. See you later!”

Avery holds back her malevolent laughter. Exactly the opposite. She’d be testing out her horrible puzzles. Almost certainly, she’d be using up a massive amount of mana creating them, but those were one-time expenses for reusable time consumers. As soon as the invader leaves, Avery engraves the symbols on the wall of the room to the south of the first puzzle room. She’d have the puzzles that required that hint in the other direction, both locked behind a tedious and time-consuming logic puzzle.

She spends the next hour and a half building that particular arrangement of blocks and symbols. A podum in the middle of the room cost five mana, though this time there was a large indentation rather than individual slots to place the pieces. In the center of the indentation, there was a further indentation, exactly as deep as the initial dent. Rather than being a perfectly reasonable puzzle, this hole made it so the solver had to go back to the previous room and collect one of the dummy cube pieces to slot into this podium before the solution would work. Otherwise, the central piece, which was the only one block long piece of the entire puzzle, would just fall down and the entire solution wouldn’t be level.

Twenty-three mana for the pieces, one point to engrave the initial conditions into the podium, and forty points for the puzzle doors out of the room. Avery was fairly certain the thing was solvable. Plus, since it took so long, she made a profit of mana. While the goal for this one was simply, she was still going to get a book with the rules in it set up in the corner, if possible.

All they had to do was get each row, column, and square to have one of each type of symbol, with no repeating in any of those three things. Putting the pieces together instead of just having individual blocks probably made it much easier, but she was low on mana at the moment. Spending eighty one on a single puzzles pieces just wasn't economical yet. She'd make it harder if she revisited it later, or more likely she'd just make the later ones harder to begin with.

Avery, curious, starts thinking about what happens with the positive mana regeneration when she's in her body instead of the core. With how much mana regeneration she currently had, it was reasonable to assume that even with all the mana currently available to her entering her body and leaving the core at zero, it wouldn't have a negative result while she was alive and healing. In fact, she'd come back to the core in two hours with far more mana than she left. It would be a nice change from frantic building and then waiting for it to build up. Plus, she'd get a couple hours of sleep.

Moving her map back up to the initial cavern, the necromancer casts the spell to bring herself to life once again.