Chapter 10

Thinking things over, Arcius decided to sleep for a few years, in order to let the inter-relations between his new species develop. Then, he looked over the enchantments and inscriptions he had learnt in his past life. There were many, ranging from simple AOE buffs and de-buffs to grand enchantments that could render entire nations nigh-indestructible to magical effects.

Of course, the latter cost an obscene amount of power, all things considered, more so than even the Magmatic Seal. The Seal was great, but not only were its manipulative abilities restricted to a single element (Earth), they were restricted to a single part of that element (Magma), and they took a great amount of time and effort to use.

As he was looking over them all, he found a few that caught his eye. There was the Territorial Guard enchantment, one bound to living things, that drove them to defend an area, as well as the Fields of Grand Strength and Suffering, which cast a large area strength buff and damaging de-buff respectively, and a few more.

He chose to pause his deliberations for a moment to look at his creatures. The Tertiagin remained mostly the same, especially as they had no other creatures to deal with yet, being the only animals able to survive the cold rooms they occupy. The only real change to happen to them is that the combination of minerals present in E2.3 and E3.3 seemed to boost both their fertility and their aggressiveness.

They weren’t actively hunting and eating each other like the Secugin, and were breeding more regularly. Instead, they were more… hot-headed. In E3.1, one Tertiagin stealing another’s food just before it can eat causes annoyance in the ‘victim’, but nothing really comes of it. In fact, with their current level of development, the ‘victim’ soon forgets they were ever slighted.

In E2.3 and E3.3, however, even if the ‘victim’ forgets why they are trying to attack the Tertiagin that stole from them, they still rush at it violently, trying eagerly to harm, but, strangely enough, not to kill. It seems even in this angered state they retain enough of their natural instincts and predisposition to avoid actually slaughtering the other Tertiagin. But, to sum it all up, they were more prone to aggressive, albeit non-fatal, responses and over-reactions.

The Primagin and Secugin in E2.5, on the other hand, had a more interesting development. Their other newfound homes were moved into without issue, but here, two species overlapped one another. The Secugin held pretty much total dominion over the deeper waters, so long as they were as far as possible from the shoreline. The Primagin, on the other hand, were the rulers of the shallows nearer to the shores.

This was probably because the Primagin’s only food source grew on land, rather than in the water, meaning they had little reason to venture to the deeper waters. The Secugin, on the other hand, have no food on land, but plenty in the water. The result, was a status quo in which the Primagin and Secugin kept to the shallows and deeps respectively, and had little interaction with one another outside of the Secugin breeding season.

Interestingly enough, the Secugin actually provide no real threat to the Primagin. The bodies of the Secugin were so weak that a casual flick of a Primagin’s fin would kill them. Similarly, the scales of a Primagin were actually too tough to be bitten into by the Secugin. Their ‘eyes’ were weak points, but any time a Secugin tried to go for the eyes, it found out that the Primagin weren’t any slower than them when the beak suddenly closed around them, ending their existence in an instance.

Sometimes the Primagin didn’t even use their beaks, instead just flicking their head to the side, again killing the Secugin in an instant. In fact, the only real reasons the Primagin didn’t live in the centre was due to youth safety as well as happiness. From the looks of things, whenever a Secugin happens to encounter and attack a Primagin, the Primagin is not really damaged in anyway by the bites, but they seem to be at least irritating to endure.

Also, from the one incident, that Arcius saw, where a ‘young’ Primagin left the shallows for the deeps, it would seem that the scales of that youngling were not yet developed enough to withstand the Secugin. Primagin grow quickly, easily reaching maturity within a month, and live for about five times that long from birth to death.

They also instinctually keep to the shallows while young, rarely venturing any deeper than that area before reaching maturity. Hence why the young tend to stay in the shallows as well. Also, of course, the Secugin breeding rate meant that, naturally, there was a pretty much limitless supply of them, so no real threat of Secugin dying off entirely, meaning that the constant irritations from entering the deep water, is pretty much there to stay.

Following a similar vein, the only reasons the Secugin don’t also live in the shallows are, first, because there are too many Primagin concentrated in the same are in the shallows, meaning that the Secugin kind of just die by accident whenever they g there, and second, despite the swarm of younglings produced in the Secugin breeding season, the teeth of the younglings are unable to harm the younglings of the Primagin, which is why the Primagin’s younglings don’t all die off every breeding season.

Looking over these interactions, as well as the innate aggressiveness of the Secugin against their own kind, actually made Arcius worry for the future. If they fought against each other so much, how would they be able to deal with an invader? Sure that was a long way off, but when it inevitably happens, if his creature are fighting and killing themselves, they will be less effective at fighting off the invader.

That’s when it struck him. He had the perfect way to solve his problem. He turned to the Territorial Guard enchantment, and altered it, creating a new enchantment he chose to name the Eternal Duty. This enchantment would provide an innate connection between all lifeforms that it influences, causing them to case any hostility with each other upon its activation, and make them instead turn hostile towards anything that was not under the influence of the enchantment.

He made it so that it would trigger when he sent a specific Mana code into the enchantment, and then spent almost all of his Mana carving the runes of the enchantment, not into the walls or the floor, but into the very DNA of every lifeform in his Dungeon. He made the Eternal Duty, not simply an enchantment in a room, but a part of the genetic code of every lifeform – plant of animal – within the Dungeon.

This would ensure that not only did he not have to maintain the enchantment, and cycle it every century or so, but it would also forever be a part of them, even when they left the Dungeon, meaning they would still come to one another’s aid in the event that he called for it.

He tested it shortly after implementation. It worked beautifully. The violent versions of the Tertiagin stopped any hostilities. The Secugin stopped eating themselves. And, the Primagin and Secugin stopped fighting one another. Of course this all ended when he sent the signal to de-activate the Duty, but this was still great work. Arcius looked into his Dungeon, excitedly waiting to see what new developments would come about from all of this.