The march has stopped, temporarily, my undead are licking their wounds and mending themselves. They are also creating more undead, mostly bone beasts. Even in the middle of all of this I still encourage them to do what they want, some of them are changing their armor styles a bit, some are adding bits and pieces to it, I have noticed that a lot of skeletons like having some type of rib decoration on their chest pieces, slowly they are starting to look different from one another.

Seeing all of them together and changing is pretty nice, even some of the zombies are getting on it, which is making a few of them quite scary, a mix or rotten flesh and crab carapace, they look quite menacing and I can’t help but imagine running into a few of them in the dark ebon forest.

Which brings me to my domain, my forest piece in the greenhouse looks very nice, there is the entrance which is a giant skull, a little tacky but still quite nice looking, and then the bleak forests which have a pretty nice natural ambiance.

Now for my core floor…it does not look as good. It’s a mixture of blank walls and floors, sure there’s a small labyrinth with traps, and my testing area, but it’s really kind of… well boring, visually.

My testing area is necessary, for a multitude of reasons. That little bauble that I gave Irax came from it. I used some slime from the crystal slimes and a bit of black bone to make the thing. The slimes are very important for me, not only because of their cuteness, but also because a source of pure unaligned mana is very useful for me.

I only create necrotic mana, and the problem is that it takes more mana than necessary to create certain things than normal.

It’s a pretty simple concept really, fire mana is better at making fires than water mana, you could use water mana to make a fire but it’s a waste of energy. I could make a naturally necrotic aligned metal, that would make it easier and more cost effective to make it, but really I can’t only make necro aligned things. I do have that heart of frost, which means I could make ice aligned things too, and I have found that the ebon trees have shadow mana in them.

Anyway, I’m rambling now, the point is although my testing area is necessary it is also not aesthetically pleasing to me. In fact most of my domain is not. So I am going to fix it.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

I focus and take a look at the hollow tube.

I then create a gigantic amount of skull reliefs all over it, well, all over the parts I have control.

There are now multiple skulls of many sizes, though most are way bigger than a normal human skull. The effect is quite nice, there is no pattern to the skulls, they are not perfectly side by side, in fact many of them are not even properly aligned, being upside down or leaning to the side. There is however a small empty space all around each of the skulls, forming a twisting pattern all over the walls. The pattern almost looks like cracks on the wall and I fill them with marrow trees, the white bone trees that bleed that red sap. I found that the sap has actual blood mana, or rather something like Vitality mana, meaning I could probably use it in place of blood if I ever need it.

I open them in the middle, and before they start bleeding I plug the opening with a white cloudy quartz.

These quartz are originally necrotic aligned, using a special array I transformed it into an empty no element crystal.

The crystal is sadly low quality, I simply do not have the specialized equipment to do this process without making the crystal much much worse.

It will have to do for now, hopefully this means I will get blood crystals or something like that in the near future. It should work, hmm, maybe I could get those glowing lichen and transform them into glowing red lichen? It would make the ambience quite nice.

Now this was Part 1 of my plans, now starting Part 2. Interior decoration.

Right now in my core room Asterion and a lot of digging undead are staring at a wall.

Asterion looks quite different, his Squire class became Full Metal Excavator, and gave him {Steel Skin}, which makes him quite shiny, his {Rock Skin} became {Rock Body}, making him really heavy, his new rocky body can regenerate from eating dirt and rocks too, outside of that not much has changed.

Asterion and his friends are the best at digging, so I hope this means they will take to this new task well.

Using {Stone Recreation and Manipulation} I carve the rock wall in front of them, first I create a relief of a skeleton. The skeleton is standing, his right hand is open and to his side, his left is holding a scythe, the blade of the weapon is resting on the ground, the skeleton’s skull is tilted looking slightly up and to his left.

Then to the side of the relief I create the same image, but this time as a statue, it is significantly rougher than the relief, my manipulation not quite that dextrous yet.

Then a last piece. I create the famous scene of Theseus fighting the minotaur, unlike that ancient myth my minotaur has kick ass claws, and the result is the stabbing of Theseus. My minions walk around the statues to take a better look, and I tell them I want them to create things like that on the labyrinth. I even create sculpting tools for them. I might be expecting too much, but I think they might create better statues than me.

It’s honestly a little sad how bad my sculpting is. I remember back when I had a body I could slap a piece of marble and make statues a hundred times better than these, but now even with the manipulation skills my control is so bad, well at least my undead seem to like them well enough.

I do notice that a lot of them seem pretty enamored with the Asterion statue. I really hope my mini labyrinth doesn’t become some kind of minotaur fanclub.