Leaving the cave wolves to organise themselves, I turned my attention back to the nest. Specifically, the two large caverns both completely inaccessible due to a surplus of rubble. It was time to bring in my landscaping and remodelling crew, the Burrowers. My hope is that I can use them to expand the labyrinth of tunnel to fill all of the solid stone take up multiple layers using them. Looking over their design I don’t see many issues, overall most dungeon life is well optimised but the Tyx seem to be refined till a stage of perfection: that standard of perfection made one thing stick out to me like a sore thumb. The tyx venom. Why in the hell do the Burrower have Tyx venom? It has literally zero use for them, I can’t even remove it’s glands for some reason and making any changes towards it is a nightmare as well! Thankfully I do have one idea that, if it works, will turn their venom into something legitimately useful. I will, however, have to completely revamp the entirety of the venom gland basically only preserving the fact it’s a gland. My idea is simple, bees have this little trick where they eat some nectar and some pollen, drink some water and then just chill for a while; afterwards, they somehow magically turn all that stuff they made into honey, royal jelly or bees wax. In addition, worms, when eating soil immediately excrete their waste behind them basically filling their own paths and this soil is more nutritious for plants as the compounds in it have been broken down already. My plan is to create a hybridisation of these two things, the burrowers have the ability to eat stone already so the goal is just to have them process this stone into a building material that can be secreted through their now defunct venom glands! Perfect! Well, no, there’s quite a few problems with this approach.

Firstly, this would create the rebuilt walls in the form of some quickly hardening, cement like goop within the burrowers mouths and the idea of it hardening while still within their mouths could be a very real threat. Secondly, since the substance is being created at their fronts it won’t replace the land they’ve just dug through and that would instead have to be dealt with through a labour intensive process. Thirdly, the ingoing stone could contaminate the outgoing ‘Tyx Cement’ making it brittle/weak/unstable/unusable in some other way. Thankfully, I’ve already brainstormed some basic solutions to these issues and think I have something approaching a workable design, to address these problems in order.

First, we’ll create 2 glands, one that creates a liquid that quickly evaporates upon exposure to open air and the over is the main building material. When still in the burrowers maw these liquids would be mixed and thus stay as a sludge however after being lathered on the intended surface the primary liquid evaporates leaving the other remaining substance to return to its natural state as a solid. This will also make the Tyx Cement far quicker to dry and harder to replicate if I get some over enthusiastic researchers making visits, In addition, it makes the Tyx Cement a lot easier to dismantle in a non destructive manner and since the solvent disperses as soon as its exposed to open air I doubt invaders will be able to make use of it. Second, this problem I believe we’ll mostly have to tolerate as a trade off for the fact Burrowers where never meant to leave anything behind and honestly, since it’ll allow for more creative uses of the cement I don’t feel that bad about it however I feel the need to refill tunnels efficiently is something that needs resolving. My plan for this is a bit imperfect, what I intend to do is have them be able to pump out their cement and in exchange for it to having small air pockets the Burrowers can ‘reverse’ down a tunnel to quickly fill it with cement. The third solution is too actually design the cement to be full of stone chips by default, this is usually referred to ‘aggregate’ and I remember when I was interested in being an architect for a while I looked some information about the foundations of a building and I read the mix “1/3/6” somewhere. I’m pretty sure that it’s actually concrete at that point but concretes better anyway right? I feel like that makes sense… anyway so if we use shards of stone that get trapped in the maw of the burrowers as aggregate, use their modified saliva as cement then we just need a fine dust to replace the sand. I’m stuck between two ideas on that front: I could use spores from the panstips since it would help the species spread and grow as well as making the source be self replenishing however it might threaten the overall integrity of the structure if fungi starts growing inside the walls and since the spores might wear down; or I could use crystal shards, which would still make the walls feel filled with light and are also durable however there is a limited supply, there’s still an abundance for now but that can’t last forever.

I put that aside for now and start thinking about what I want to make tyx cement out of. Obviously, I’d love to just have my walls be made of diamond and call it a day but that’s impractical, first of all, if anyone comes here they’ll just spend all day mining my walls and nothing else. Secondly that would take a lot of carbon, a material I unfortunately only have access to in the forms of my creatures and plants. Thirdly, emulating the necessary environment inside the burrowers so that the carbon doesn’t just become graphite and is thus useless would almost certainly kill the poor things. Fourthly, diamonds need to grow and form as one cohesive unit, even if I do use them my walls will just be as weak as whatever I come up with to glue them together. No, diamond doesn’t work. I do, however, remember a material similar in hardness that occurs naturally. Hell, I even have some in my territory. Silicon carbide. It’s used in a bunch of stuff: even bulletproof vests! And it gets formed using pressure rather than heat so it should be possible and there’s no other silicon/carbon compounds that I know of so it doesn’t have the diamond problem where it’ll probably form something else instead. There are other problems and I have ideas to resolve them but… well my chemistry isn’t that good, I do have a qualification in it but I forgot everything from that class immediately. My hope is that I can tie the Burrowers mana into the process which should let magic smooth over some of the stuff that shouldn’t work, I’m hoping to create a molecular structure similar to beeswax while still preserving the SiC crystal.

I don’t exactly trust magic yet: I don’t understand it. That’s why I haven’t been using it in my other creatures, however, I will need to do something with it eventually. No magic is just too big of a handicap, my wolves are hopefully smart enough to figure out how to make use of it eventually and the Tyx will be able to share knowledge through the hive mind but baking it into somethings biology is just too unique of an advantage for me to turn down. Maybe this won’t work out but I’d rather it happen with a non-combatant than one of my fighters. So the plan is to increase the precision of the Burrowers in exchange for them loosing out a little on power and speed. Swap out their venom glands with two different ‘Tyx Cement’ glands that have the liquifying agent in one and the concrete base produced by the other, the cement based on silicon carbide while the liquifying agent will use the excess calcium. Give them something similar to ‘hamster cheeks’ in their maws so they can store shards of stone that they’ll turn into aggregate as well as the ground up quartz dust and then link up their mana to the whole system. With that we’ll have our perfect tunnel crew that can both hollow out and fill new paths as they’re needed, hopefully with this we can create a ‘shifting maze’ effect to shut down any mapping attempts for the tunnels.

After spending an hour or so properly designing the new ‘Tyx Tunnelers’ I was confident that despite the problems it was rife with, my Tyx Cement plan was it actually had a chance of success. Surprisingly, once I had a clear idea of what I wanted the glands to end up like I felt far less resistance in changing them. Maybe it’s because ‘Tyx Venom’ is something very specific so I have to be completely changing the venom glands or not at all and that’s why it resisted the small adjustments earlier. Getting the mana to behave itself was actually very interesting as well, I had to create a mana ‘heart’ that would pump mana as if it where blood down some mana ‘veins’ that led to the glands of the Tunnellers, the process was quite enlightening since at first it felt like I was creating a mana which meant I kept trying to do just that. Create a bundle of mana, swirl it around a little, let it collect and then viola! But no, after many failures I finally figured out where I was going wrong. Everything alive had mana, I already knew that but I was being pretty ignorant of its implications. What that actually meant was every living thing naturally had a mana pool that collected mana as they lived, what made someone able to do magic was the ability to control and shape that pool therefore once I realised that I knew my entire approach had to change.

Giving the Tunnellers the ability to manipulate mana, basically making them an entire race of mages, solely through instinctive memories was way to big an ask. Instead I had to make it easy for them to do the one thing I wanted, I knew this had to be possible since the Dust Leafs could do it for self-destruction purposes I just needed to retro fit the idea into my Tunnellers concrete production. For a while I was lost till I remembered the air slash skill of the Reavers, surely that used mana. After checking the Reaver blueprint I got so fascinated I almost immediately wanted to start work on them but I put it aside in order to stay on task, I’d figured out how these ‘mana skills’ that weren’t actually spells but instead simple magic effects worked. It was their I saw the mana veins. Little metaphysical channels for the mystical energy to flow through the body, the reavers had them all throughout the body but mainly focused on their scythes but I figured the Tunnellers can afford to devote everything to their glands and started to work on locating the tunnellers mana pool. It was located at the base of their stomach, seeming to play a part in the earth eating abilities of the Burrowers, modifying this ability so it would be able to store one part of the stone, convert another to mana and use the third part as food I then started drawing large channels that linked the Cement Glands into the network. This ensured the material and magical supply needs of concrete creation could be fulfilled so I just needed to make some small, superficial changes for my own personal perfectionism.

The first was the hamster cheeks for stone storage which where rather simple, just two overlapping flaps of skin that when loose would be able to let some materials through but when pulled taught would create a perfect seal and partition some small pockets of the mouth area of from the rest, I was quite proud of these despite their simplicity just due to how elegant of a solution it was if o where being perfectly honest. The next was a purely aesthetic change, I first made sure the Tunnellers where completely bone white then I went back to the glands. The goal was to make them compound they created be coloured a slight chalky type of white with some metallic purple swirls running through it that would make the tunnels even more disorienting. The purple I figured I could achieve since silicon carbide produced this strange metallic rainbow usually characteristic of bismuth. I watched a video of someone creating bismuth crystals one time and they mentioned that the rainbow was determined by the thickness of the oxide layer so if I just make it all uniform at the point that shines purple then I’ll have that sorted. The chalk was even easier, I could create actual chalk with some calcium, carbon and oxygen so if I made that be a surface layer residue left by the dissolving liquifying agent then it shouldn’t just get scraped of either. My final change was more just to see if it was possible than for any tangible benefits.

I wanted to emulate the piercing, snapping limbs that reavers have on the tunnellers to help them move. The reaver limbs acted like pincers, being slowly wound back by tightening limbs before releasing all that pent up force at once to puncture through prey, my idea was to build some legs like that by the sides of the tunnels that could help force them forward when in tight spaces that they can’t easily crawl through. The idea was to have these limbs slip underneath sections between the tunnellers shell and usually lie flush next to their bodies but they could stick onto slight outcroppings of stone for when in use. This was strangely easy however I found myself limited to only creating two of these… maybe because the reavers only have two? Though that wouldn’t match how things behaved when copying over the idea of the mana circuits… another question filed away for later.

I was going to stick with trend of giving my first summon a name, Kivi, it’s the Finnish word for stone as well as calculus. I remember seeing a joke about that double meaning on a forum once and for some reason it stuck with me but I figure it fits with the purpose of the tunnellers and it’s a good name anyway. I spent some essence on the first tunneller, watching as the essence was wound into a behemoth of a worm. It was about a meter in diameter and nearly ten meters long, had small beady eyes that where covered by slits of overlapping chitin armour like a knight’s armour and their was a faint white fog constantly wafting from their gaping maw which was filled with countless rows of teeth that looked like they could chew through steel. An accurate assessment, all things considered. Watching as the beast slowly raised itself of the ground and a constant monotone, drumming warble was emitted through the cave I felt giddy in a way that sent me back to being a kid at Christmas. This was mine! I made this! Even the Pack Vipers didn’t bring the same joy as these, they felt too easy. This, however, this shouldn’t have worked but… but I made it work. Even though there where issues, even though the final product is imperfect, even though I cheated by using magic. I won. This idea seemed impossible when first starting off but now, now it’s right in front of me.

After the creature was finished getting used to its own existence I gave it the name ‘Kivi’ officially and ordered it to first, drill through a small section of the blocked tunnels and second, produce some Tyx Concrete (patent pending) on a nearby wall. As soon as it got to work on the rubble I started to feel that the spring loaded limbs where a bit of a waste, Kivi raised itself up and after teetering slightly dove right into the stone, gliding through like a fish in water and leaving nothing in its wake. All of a sudden my plans for a maze that changes while you’re still in it felt a lot more practical. It then made its way over to the nearby wall and laid down some Tyx cement. The wall dried within minutes, emanating the same white mist throughout the entire process and leaving behind a chalk white wall with sporadic swirls of a mystifying amaranthine which your eyes followed along almost by instinct. I had some Tyx Swarmlings trying and crack some of the stone rubble, using their legs like picks to get a comparison point and in a few full power swings they finally made some cracks.

Looks like the Tunnellers success isn’t just because the stones soft, huh. Next I had some tyx do the same with the Tyx Concrete walls and it took them ten tries to even get to to see the metallic lustre hidden underneath, I didn’t bother seeing how long it would take for cracks to emerge. The concrete was more than strong enough, far more than enough. Creating the remaining 100 Tunnellers, I decided the 5 essence I’d save by only making half wasn’t worth it, I had all of them immediately dedicated to covering as many of the tunnel walls in the concrete ASAP. I made half of them start from the tunnels nearest to the nest and the other half I scattered throughout the tunnel systems in order to make delvers unable to target the nest by looking at where the walls switch to concrete. Only one creature left now.