I watch a little crab walk along the muddy ground of my dungeon. Just like Irax said, random crabs keep spawning around the deceased crab’s domain. The crab walks near a set of pointy white stones, the ‘stones’ shift and the crab finds itself inside a bone crocodile’s mouth the beast, Bonebeast, closes its jaws and absorbs the little crab.

The crocodile is a newer creation, it’s made with a single long tongue which is then surrounded by the barghest bone and finally an outer shell of normal bone creating the bulk of the crocodile body. The barghest bones have a few abilities that have yet to manifest on the crocodiles so my dreams of invisible crocodiles will have to wait a bit.

I change my view to a flying skull and see several surfboard sized oval arrays on the ground coming from my cave entrance and connecting to the large body of water. The arrays are simple and effective mana circulators, their purpose is to move mana around quickly and soon enough I will have a better control of this area. I was going to focus on making more of them to make the process faster, sadly the lizard’s weird passive state is seriously bugging me out, so I diverted the skeleton power to create other arrays in preparation for a fight.

I tell the flying skull to turn around and…Wait, turn back.

My vision moves around as the skull turns to focus on something I saw from the corner of their eyes and I focus on a small clatter of skeletons. Kaiman is right there along with his group of skeletons, all of them forming a ring around… two small crabs… both fighting in the middle of a drawn circle in the mud. Looking closely I see that both crabs are not run of the mill crabs either, both of them have small changes clearly made by one of the skeletons. One has a crown of sharp teeth on the edge of its shell, the other one has a small black skull fused in its shell, sitting between its eyestalks. I watch for a bit and see the black skull crab win the battle by ring out, then I see a skeleton pulling a fullberry and giving it to the winning crab.

The crab voraciously eats the berry and activates a skill {Rapid Food Absorption} and the skeleton starts manipulating its shell, making it grow and after a few minutes the crab is visibly bigger and a bit more healthy looking too, having gained a more vibrant color.

Well, I leave them to their crab fighting and go check the woods. Quickly reaching my destination I take a close look at the various arrays created on the trunk of the various gloomwood trees, the arrays are pretty simple, they use the fact that the trees naturally produce shadow mana to quickly plunge an area in dark fog. I keep touring the place and checking a few more traps. A few of the gloomwood trees have shining runes and geometric symbols all over them, the area around them seemingly even darker than the other trees.

This is another pretty simple array, a light gathering one, it naturally attracts light towards itself, making the area around it darker and itself brighter. When activated it created a bright flash of light.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

There are spike pits, ambush spots and even bone minefields around. I have also created many places with choke points to retreat or hole up a bit. I am just waiting for a few more to be done and the attack will happen. Some skeletons have been looking forward to it, Stinger for example, she is actually at Level 24 at her main class, the most interesting part about that is that she passed to me her feeling of… inadequacy? Apparently she can feel that with a few more skills and some training her next class can be quite a bit better so she is apparently forcefully stopping herself from leveling up, she said it’s something she just found out she can do, if she focuses on it. She did also explain that she doesn’t think she could’ve done that before.

I asked Merlin and he said he cannot feel that for his main class, but he can feel it for his Spell Aide class. His main class is level 26, while his Spell Aide class is 8, so close to the change at level 10, he also said he does not feel the inadequacy like Stinger. I went around and it does seem that those close to 10 or 25 can feel the change coming, though if the class evolution is good or not seems to be something only Stinger can say with certainty, most of the others can’t.

Speaking of Merlin, right now he’s sitting cross legged on the ground with the Heart of Frost and a prototype Necro core in front of him. He grabs the core, a melon sized transparent ball with swirling purple patterns leading to its center where a black bone core rests. He opens his crystal body and puts the core just above his pelvis then he secures it in place with some crystal formation. He does the same for the heart, this time on his chest, putting it close to his right side ribs.

Merlin then simulates breathing noises with his voice, like the ones you make for exercises, necrotic mana starts being directed to his core and at the same time mana from the frost heart is pulled and fills the mana vacuum created inside his body. His body is filled with ice mana now and he starts the exercise. I create some water right on top of his head and dump it on him. Ice crystals form around his form creating a small layer of frost.

His crystal skin cracks and the ice cold mana inside of him seeps out and connects to the frost filling the cracks. The two mana types start slowly merging, the ice crystals and necrotic crystals slowly merging and becoming a new skin. The end result is… lumpy, Merlin’s crystal exoskeleton has changed tones, now being a mixture of dark purple and light purple with some hairline cracks of white, the texture changes from smooth crystaline to rough crystal.

He uses {Reave} and creates five small claws, created from necrotic ice and crystal, again the construct is somewhat lumpy. He activates his {Shade Mantle : Jack o’ Frost} and tries again, this time everything goes smoothly, literally, the lumps disappear and his claws become sharp. And more importantly, a second ice skin appears inside of his crystal one, meaning he now has two layers of defense.

I get a call from one of my miners and quickly go see what they found.

On the third floor of the labyrinth they have found a weird mineral vein. I quickly take a look and just by seeing how it is interacting with the necrotic mana I already have an idea. Using my skill I see that I was partially right. It’s a vein of Half Silver Mithril, or HS mithril, this is basically low quality mithril, but it still is mithril.

The metal is… good, sadly it is also quite dangerous for most ‘negative’ aligned beings, like undead, but still this could be very useful, mithril is also very powerful against elementals too, among other beings like fae and demons. I could probably make some interesting things with this. The miners call attention to another thing. I take a closer look and see a tunnel, with a weirdly smooth entrance, and I can feel the way it… rejects my mana, my domain.

I think I found another dungeon.