Thing’s started moving fast after Irax’s sudden departure, Kaiman and his crew of boneshapers went out and started to further tinker with their bonebeasts Gorger and his zombies following, for some reason interested in seeing the boneshapers work. I quickly check some skills I gained right after the core was destroyed.

{Boss Room}

Select a room and transform it into a Boss Room, selected minions gain special abilities while inside this room, all materials inside the room gain increased resistance to all forms of damage and manipulation, the room and all minions and materials inside naturally regenerate and respawn after being destroyed.

{Respawn}

When a minion over Level 10 dies they will naturally respawn in your core room, the time it takes depends on a variety of factors.

{Loot Drop}

All minions have a list of materials and items they may drop when killed depending on their levels, the better materials and items the faster and cheaper they are to respawn.

{Mutable Exoskeleton}

All minions over level 10 can be given this skill, which will mutate depending on a variety of factors.

Lots of things about these skills, first is that the exoskeleton cannot be given to minions that already had it, for example Merlin can’t get it again. I gave it to a few skeletons and the skill mutated into armor skills for my Zealots, Kaiman actually got {Miasma Armor} and armor made from his miasma, which is constantly regenerating, the armor looks like a bunch of dark green moss colored plates, I am going to hold off on giving it to everybody, going to run a few tests to see if some of them can get better skill mutations, for example I doubt Stinger or Gorger will gain anything really significant from this, Gorger is already a tank and regenerates very easily, Stinger is the opposite most armor will probably not do much for her since her style is dodging a lot.

{Loot Drop} Is also very interesting, and more complicated than I expected, for example, most of the Zealots drop their weapons and armor. Merlin drops a longer list of things, black bone, dark crystal, he also has a chance to drop one or both of his eyes. Now working together with {Respawn} I can tell they will come back with all their stuff, and that’s when it gets interesting, Merlin would take almost a week to respawn, with his drops he can shave off about 3 days, the Zealots would take about two days and with their drops they can get back in about 18 hours or so, some of them less than that, plus I can feel it. My core instincts tells me I can speed their recovery up. Now the most interesting thing is that I can tell that all of my minions have a… Loot table so to speak and a special space for each of them, and extra dimensional space that I can put stuff in, so that when they die these items drop instead of something on their bodies.

I create a black bone and I push it into this space that I am somehow aware of but cannot detect at all, the bone pops out of existence and I can feel it appearing on Merlin’s loot table. I can tell that it went down, it’s about 60 hours for him to naturally come back, now a black bone will always drop, I will probably do it for everybody eventually, though it will cost a lot of mana, still faster respawns should always be better for me. I will fiddle with this a little more later, right now I have other stuff to do, like command my skeletons.

Merlin and a few other skeletons are investigating the stairs and quickly find something interesting, right above the opening to the stairs there is writing, it reads “Gate Portals” which makes me tell them to go down carefully. The stairs are not long and soon we are in a large corridor at each side against a wall are circular arches made from gray colored metal, 14 of them. Using {Analyze} tells me they are Elemental Portals and I can see that one of them has been used recently. I can do that because there is a large amount of mercury on the ground right in front of it with a bunch of very large shrimps on it and quite a few shrimp corpses, no mama shrimp though.

This is probably how the dungeon got those mercury mantis shrimps, getting closer I see a further detail, on the side of the arch there is a spell circle with a sword floating inside of the circle a quick check shows me it is a quicksilver sword, an alloy of silver and mercury primarily, and a lot of mana very good weapon for murdering ghosts and such. the arches are elemental ones, I imagine that they need a… pointer so to speak for which elemental plane they open too. Right on top of the circle there is some text saying that mana levels are low and a portal can only be open for approximately 6 seconds before automatically shutting down due to low energy, above it is a shining button that activates the portal.

I tell Merlin to put some of his crystal on one of them and activate it, he quickly breaks some crystal from his hand and puts it into a circle, a text appears saying the same thing as before, Merlin presses the button.

The entire room shines for a second, hidden arrays come to life all around the arch and I feel Merlin’s excitement at looking at the scripts match mine. The inside of the large circle shines a deep purple and then it activates fully, the portal opens and stabilizes showing us what’s on the other side.

Purple,green and gray shades appear on the other side, the entire vista is made out of giant purple crystals of many different sizes, some rivaling oaks and other trees, their shapes equally diverse, some are sharp spikes others look almost like squarish tubes, most of them are not the pretty gems you generally see, in fact many of them have rough exteriors and many scratch marks.

On the sky a bright pale green sun, or moon shines and as the light passes through the myriad crystals it transforms into shades of gray and sometimes black. The ground is a glittering dark desert probably made from broken bits of crystal. The wind picks up and the air from the portal enters the room, carrying with it extremely small and fine crystal particles.

With the light from the green sun it is quite easy to see that the air in this plane is filled with these little things. I imagine a breathing human would not appreciate this crystal filled air. My skeletons don’t care, Merlin himself looks spellbound and then the portal closes. We will have to test a lot of stuff with these portals, my main question now is if they always open at the same place. But first we need to put a lot more mana in here. Outside of the mercury, and now the crystal, the rest of the portals don’t have anything on them so I tell my mage skeletons to come back, Merlin specially, to come to my core floor.

Merlin is within sight of the giant skull cavern entrance when I activate one of my surprises. The mercury made array thrums to life and activates, it pulls a huge amount of necrotic energy from my domain and spits it out of the cavern mouth, the sight from Merlin’s eyes is quite amazing, the giant gray skull spewing black mana on the scenery outside and polluting the air.

This is part of my plan to quickly get the crab dungeon’s area for myself, I will then use some other stuff to direct all the mana towards the water and infect it, after that it should be easy to gain complete control of the place.

Merlin takes a few minutes to inspect the mercury array before coming to my core room where my second surprise comes. I activate the voice box.

“Surprise!” I scream, a bit too loudly, it echoes all over my core room and some of my maze. Merlin actually flinches, that’s the first time I’ve seen a skeleton do that.

“Mistress?”

“Mistress? You talking to me?” I ask, already knowing the answer, still being called mistress… is really weird, I’m pretty sure that’s the first time he’s calling me that too..

“Yes, mistress”

“Why are you calling me that?” Could it be that my voice box sounds older than I intended?

“I felt that was the appropriate way to address you, would you prefer ‘master’ ?”

“Just call me Alyssa.” Though I would also prefer ‘master’ over ‘mistress’, or miss maybe, mistress just rubs me the wrong way.

Merlin hesitates a bit before saying, “That’s not appropriate, you are my superior and creator, I should address you more respectfully.”

“How about ‘Miss Pluto’, actually how about just ‘miss’ ?”. Merlin stays quiet for a while.”Or, how about you call me teacher?”

“Teacher?” He says and I can hear from his tone that he likes it. “Teacher…yes, that is quite appropriate.” Merlin isn’t moving his head but his tone is that of someone nodding to himself.

“Alright, come forward I have made a new room specially for you.” He follows my lead and enters my last surprise, a room full of magic circles on the ground, each one slightly different and sometimes with a few items in the middle.”Go to the first circle on your left and activate it.”

Merlin does so and a small purple gray fire appears in the middle of the circle.

“Necrotic fire, I will make you that core so you can manipulate other elements without trouble, but for now you can train a bit with this.” Merlin puts his hand on the fire and scoops a bit with his hand, using mana manipulation he feeds it his own mana and the fire changes color to a more purple fire.

“Why did it change colors?” Hehehe, I knew he was going to ask that.

“Just like there are various shades of color there are various shades of mana manipulation, for example both your rays and Kaiman’s miasma are necrotic mana manipulation, but they are very different from one another. Think about their main differences and then look at the circle.” Merlin stares at the circle on the ground for a little while.

“Ah, it’s density and how much mana we spend, this circle pulls in the mana from the core, which is much denser and much more powerful than mine.” He approaches the flame on the ground and compares with the one on his hands. “Is this how true necrotic mana looks then? Gray? Shouldn’t it be black?”

“Yes it can be black, but true pure necrotic black flames require a ridiculous amount of necrotic mana, it’s a lot easier to make black ice or black miasma. Which there are— circles around here for.” What the fuck is Gorger doing?

“Are there circles for all elements?” Merlin asks while looking around the room, noting the ones with things in the middle of them.

“Yeah, the most basic ones though, earth, wind ,water, fire, oh, go to the one with the branch, yeah that one.”

Merlin goes to the middle of the circle and picks up a branch with a purple quartz gem on top, the thing looks like a big magnifying glass, though the quartz is not see-through.

“Touch the quartz and push in some mana.” Merlin does so and through the other side of the quartz comes a spurt of purpleish fire.”This is a little test for you, push the mana through the branch all the way to the quartz, it shouldn’t be too difficult for you. Now go to that— empty circle there and activate it.” Gorger suddenly started to call me, I told him to wait a bit. Merlin activates the circle and a flame with shades of bright and dark green pops out.

“That’s a rot flame, a necrotic flame specially made to cause living things to rot. Merlin, go around a bit and think which one of these you wanna study first, I will be right back.“ I could go and see what Gorger wants and talk to Merlin at the same time, but I also want to give him my full attention, plus I don’t think he minds being alone in this room for a little bit, in fact he looks like a kid left at a candy shop. I quickly hop to Gorger’s vision and see… a tall humanoid made of bone, a hollow humanoid shape more accurately, the thing is… inside of this hollow shell there are a bunch of tongues of various sizes squirming, making a rough fleshy skeleton inside the being. The being looks like a large mannequin, I can see it was made from bones and crab carapaces and some of Gorger’s teeth, the body is mostly humanoid with the exception of its hands, or lack of hands, and its torso and face which are just open holes.

I can see the main tongue flesh, the center one acting as a spine and coming out on top of the beings head attached to it are five tongues acting as the arms and legs, the legs end in bone made feet while the arms end in tongues with bone blades attached to them, on the being’s head and torso are a bunch of smaller pieces of tongue, the group made of Gorge, Kaiman and boneshapers are discussing how much flesh in relation to bone the body should have, plus if they should give it more long tongues, like a tail tongue for example. They stop and start explaining their other problem for me, which is why I was called. Gorger walks to a large bone fish being.

The thing looks more like a parody of a fish than an actual one, the body has a shape similar to a butterfly fish, meaning it is very laterally narrow body, the differences are that this fish also has long spines coming out of it’s back plus another long and spread out spine coming from its tail, pretty sure those are supposed to be fins but… well they lack the skin parts, though Gorger here clearly tried to help, by sticking tongue pieces on the fins, oh and also on the fish's eye sockets, so now there’s this huge, child sized spiny fish with tongues coming out of its eyes and fins, and their problem? They want to incorporate Gorger’s acid on this thing, but can’t quite get it to work since the acid eats through the bone, also they are having arguments about the fish’s mouth. Gorger wants a mouth full of tongues while Kaiman wants one full of sharp teeth.

Kaiman, use your skill to enhance the fish’s bone with acid resistance, and Gorger skin yourself and put it in the fish, that should add some resistance. Also, the question about the mouth is stupid, just do both, make a smaller mouth with sharp teeth inside the bigger mouth, the fish will use the tongues to grap and secure prey and then the smaller mouth to bit it. I then send them a mental image of a sea devil and go back to Merlin.

“So have you made your decision? What do you wanna learn first?” Merlin rapidly starts looking around the room, like a child who has to choose which toy to ask their parents to buy.

“If only there were more of me… I could study so much faster, and so much more…” I decide to not tell him that there are cloning spells, and that yes many wizards used them to study more stuff. He’s already too much of a nerd, plus I have no way of actually making or casting those spells for now.

“I choose the fire spells, for now.”