Another swarm attempted to assault Serenity, followed by a third. No matter how many attacked at once, they just bounced. Whatever attack they were using was probably very dangerous to undead, but Serenity wasn’t undead. It simply didn’t affect him any more than their presence or use of Death-based magic did.

Serenity almost wanted to keep them around for the amusement value, but no matter how much the Death-wisp swarms reminded Serenity of Curio when he decided to playfight as a kitten, they were dangerous to the Necropolis and its people. There was really no reason to keep them; they weren’t sapient. Indeed, they were more like a nest of wasps than they were like Curio.

Serenity waited for as many to attempt to attack him as he could get. The space around him was distorted and darkened by the time he decided he had enough of them and triggered his Eat Death Skill.

The smallest wisps dissipated in midair, while the others became visibly smaller. He pushed the Skill, pulling still more Death mana in which he expelled immediately in the area. It wouldn’t help the Death-wisps, but it might attract others.

An hour later, Serenity headed back to the City Lord’s Residence. There were still some wisps in the area, but he’d handled enough of them that other people should be able to clean out the remainder. He hadn’t cleaned up the Death mana scattered everywhere; this was the Necropolis. If people couldn’t handle the Death mana, they needed to learn. The area could be cleared out by people who could handle it.

When Serenity told Hale what he’d done, the mercenary captain rubbed his forehead like he had a headache before he thanked Serenity. Unfortunately, even with that problem mostly handled, Hale didn’t have the spare people to send a group to Earth. It would likely be a few years before he really had the Necropolis under control.

That was good enough. Serenity didn’t need mercenary assistance yet. In many ways, it might be better to bring them in only after he knew where he wanted to send them; yes, he could bring them in at any Earth portal and get them to where they needed to be, but that also meant that he could bring them in later.

There were another two days of discussions with Stojan Tasi before the Planetary Manager was satisfied that they’d gone over everything important for now. Serenity didn’t think they were all necessary, since he’d confirmed almost all of Stojan Tasi’s choices, but it was true that there were a few decisions that he made differently.

The primary one was the relationship between the Shining Caverns and the Necropolis; Stojan Tasi had done nothing to ease the tensions between the two cities and that simply meant that there would be more trouble in the future. Stojan Tasi believed that there wasn’t a solution; the hatred ran deep and simply couldn’t be dealt with. Serenity agreed that there was no immediate solution; real change would take decades, probably generations. Even so, you didn’t get anywhere without trying.

Serenity proposed a pair of initiatives. The first was almost pushing the problem off onto other people, because it was adding a third license for mercenary groups, one that would allow them to recruit from both cities instead of making them choose. It would warn of the hostility but leave how to handle it up to the mercenary company or group.

The second was opening official trade. There was already a black market between the two cities; Serenity proposed to bring it into the light. It would bring in a small amount of Etherium, but that wasn’t the point. If they kept the costs low and only prohibited the trade in extreme things like undead creatures in the Shining Caverns, it ought to help. Eventually. Probably.

With that discussion over, Serenity headed to the Rest from Death dungeon. He’d checked on it from a distance once he arrived on Tzintkr and was able to feel it, but nothing replaced actually seeing it in person. It felt a little off and he wanted to visit it to find out why.

The moment he walked in, the reason was obvious: the flows didn’t balance. Serenity couldn’t immediately tell where or why, but he could tell that it was something he could investigate as long as he concentrated on the dungeon.

A Rest from Death was still being used as a central resting place for the dungeons that had been found in the area, but it was no longer also the command post for the continuing exploration since that had been discontinued after the issues in the Necropolis were discovered. There were far fewer people than there had been, but that just made it easy to rent a bed.

Six hours (and one consultation with Aki) later, Serenity knew what was going on. The dungeon was sick; the cause was different from what happened to Aki’s original dungeon, but there were strong similarities.

For Aki, the problem was a ley line that shifted. She no longer had anywhere to send the raw mana she purified, so it ended up leaking into everything, including her monsters. Unlike Serenity, her monsters couldn’t handle raw mana. Once the problem became obvious, the traffic through the dungeon decreased. It was meant to help by reducing the mana input, but mana still came in naturally from outside. It slowed the problem but didn’t stop it, while also removing the places a dungeon was supposed to send anything other than mana - people and treasure.

The A Rest from Death dungeon, on the other hand, didn’t have either a ley line or monsters. Some of it went over the link to Desinka, but some was building up. Serenity needed a place for it to go and he needed something to replace monsters. Items simply weren’t enough.

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First, the ley line. Serenity needed to know where the nearest one was; he couldn’t move the dungeon, but if the dungeon was close enough to it he would have options. They weren’t well documented, so Serenity reached out to the only person who would have an answer: the planet itself.

The closest ley line was only a bit over a mile away, well within range for what Serenity had in mind. Magic could move through some things easily, and he’d recently obtained quite a bit of metra, which should work just fine. While no one was looking, he pulled one of the metra tiles out of his Rift and fed it to the dungeon. While the dungeon could make materials, making so much of one that could leave the dungeon would be difficult. Giving it most of what it needed solved that issue.

The next step was to make a hole that crossed the distance to hold the metra. The most straightforward way would be to have the dungeon itself do it, but the moment he tried, Serenity knew it wouldn’t work well. The minimum size the dungeon could capture was about six feet wide, far wider than was needed, and trying to push even that away from the dungeon meant capturing more of a connection. There was nothing that said he couldn’t do it, but it felt blazingly uncomfortable, as if he were trying to squeeze into a space that was too tight.

No, he needed to try the other plan, the one that solved one problem with another: monsters.With the constraints the dungeon was under from when he created it, he couldn’t make monsters that were hostile to Pathed that entered, but the fact that he’d added Desinka meant that it was possible to have monsters that weren’t automatically hostile.

Serenity took the area he’d added to the dungeon and hollowed it out enough to hold the monsters he wanted, then tried to figure out how to make rock moles. He wanted four of them-

There were four rock moles in the new room of the dungeon. The dungeon didn’t yet feel particularly better, but four monsters really wasn’t very many and he still hadn’t solved the mana backup issue.

Serenity sent the rock moles off on their mission to dig out of the dungeon towards the ley line and watched. He carefully added a command to return in less than an hour; the last thing he wanted was to release rock moles into the wild. They probably wouldn’t survive for long in the heavy Death-attuned environment, but he still didn’t want to put them out there.

Serenity had never actually seen a dungeon monster break out of a dungeon, at least not when he could pay attention. Dungeon breaks were normally busy times. This time, he was able to watch. It wasn’t as simple as just digging their way out; they actually had to push through something. Serenity helped the first one, but the second one didn’t seem to need his help; it was like whatever had prevented the first one from leaving was far weaker now.

An hour’s worth of digging by the four rock moles gained Serenity about twice their length in distance, so a bit under a foot. It was going to take quite a while to reach the ley line like this, more than half a year. That should be fine; yes, it was a good bit of time, but Aki’s decline took decades and the A Rest from Death dungeon wasn’t in bad shape yet. He had the time.

Serenity created the wire that the rock moles would need to string through the hole they dug. That was the reason he’d made four of them; that way, one could always be digging, while the others were resting in the dungeon or moving the metra wire where it needed to go.

There weren’t enough monsters for the dungeon. With Desinka, it was close. With Serenity present as well, he was slowly making up the difference, but the dungeon would start losing ground again when Serenity left Tzintkra. He needed to add some more monsters.

The thing was, he didn’t really need monsters for the dungeon. The dungeon wasn’t hostile; the most monsters would be reliably able to do was play tricks, and that might well discourage people from coming. He needed help, not tricks. Even so, the thought of helpful tricksters was enough to send Serenity’s thoughts to an old myth, the house-Hob.

What he needed wasn’t a house spirit but a dungeon spirit, one who would help people who acted appropriately, whether that help was cleaning or something more difficult like repairing gear. If the spirit also played harmless tricks on those who harmed others or disrespected the dungeon, well, there was no harm in that.

The dungeon wasn’t that big and he wanted the Hobs to be capable creatures, so he only made two but invested a lot of the dungeon’s capacity in them, far more than he had in the moles. It was less than Desinka took, but that was good; he didn’t want to go too far the other way. That might just be what caused dungeon breaks.

Even Serenity couldn’t see the two Hobs when they appeared, but he knew they were there. One of them rumbled a pleasant, “Good day to you, milord,” before he headed off to deal with a mess in the dungeon that hadn’t yet bothered Serenity.

That was the most he could manage for the dungeon, for now at least, so Serenity moved on to the Shining Caverns about a day after his arrival at the A Rest from Death dungeon. The two things he had to do on Tzintkra were done, but it wouldn’t take long to check in with Desinka and Guildmaster Hollis.

Serenity found Rakyn but not his daughter Desinka when he went by their house. From what Rakyn said, Desinka was doing fine, but she was out at a dungeon and wouldn’t be back for at least a week. Serenity had already spent longer than he wanted to on Tzintkra, so after an hour’s talk with Rakyn he moved on to the Healer’s Hall.

Unlike Desinka, Hollis was in. He was cheerful and hopeful; apparently, helping his friend Stojan Tasi rebuild the Shining Caverns and retake the Necropolis was just what he’d needed to make it feel possible to advance again. He claimed that he owed Serenity a great debt, but hurried him out of the Healer’s Hall with the excuse that he was too busy to spend much time with Serenity.

Serenity felt bemused by that, but was really fairly happy. Hollis was the last person he’d really wanted to check in on, which meant it was time to head back to the Necropolis and open a portal to Earth.

That wasn’t his original plan, but his original plan didn’t include having his parents missing. This would be expensive, but was still affordable; it was cheaper than sending the people he’d rescued from Zon and Lyka home. They were closer and there weren’t as many people.